The Long History of Children as Consumers

Abstract

Few areas of postmodern life may be more disconcerting to parents and other adults than the $5 billion name-brand children's clothing market. Perhaps it is of some comfort to learn that merchants and advertisers have been pitching their wares to children since the early years of the twentieth century. In The Commodification of Childhood, sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook traces this development from the earliest trade discussions of marketing children's wear in 1917 through the explosion of children's specialty shops in the 1960s. His deeply interdisciplinary approach and nuanced interpretation result in a penetrating examination of much more than just the children's clothing industry. He enters the highly contested turf surrounding the social construction of the evolution of family governance, the shifts in the American cultural landscape, and the business of selling itself. Cook deftly lays his historical evidence onto a theoretical grid that moves The Commodification of Childhood well beyond existing studies of children's toys, literature, and culture. Cook originally intended to study children's fashion. Instead he has crafted a deeply researched, wide-ranging exploration of twentieth-century American placing Cook squarely in the forefront of a growing interdisciplinary literature on the culture of childhood.1 To explain the commodification of of the title, Cook points to the intersection of two competing ideologies. One is the idea of the purely oppressive markets which invade childhood, a concept that stands in constant tension and dialogue with the notion of the child essentially independent, free, [and] self-creating (p. 6). This conjunction of childhood and markets was (and is) morally contested space (p. 10). Cook's willingness to interrogate the presumed sanctity of childhood as well as trace the evolution of increasingly sophisticated, blatant marketing forces provides the author an opportunity to explore competing notions of childhood in postmodern America. Although he presents an insightful overview of com-