Women Shoppers Research Articles

Do men and women really shop differently? An exploration of gender differences in mall shopping in India

Abstract‘Men Buy and Women Shop’ proclaims a new Wharton Research on shopping habits of the American consumer (2007). There is found to be considerable difference in the way men and women shop in the West. Is this true across cultures? Indian retailing is generating considerable interest within the country and abroad. India has been rated as the fifth most attractive emerging retail market and was ranked first in a Global Retail Development Index of 30 developing countries drawn up by A T Kearney. Organized retail, best represented by the mushrooming malls, has come to play a defining role in building and supporting this veritable base of retail consumers. Therefore, it is of utmost interest to retailers and academia alike to understand the consumer dynamics behind the newly evolving consumption culture. This study explores mall‐shopping habits in India and attempts to identify and contrast possible differences between genders using a sample of 2721 mall consumers across seven cities. While the findings suggest that in India there are significant differences in shopping behaviour that can be ascribed to gender, there are fundamental questions about stereotyping of shopping as a feminine activity. To do this, discriminant analysis has been used to study whether shopping orientation and mall‐shopping attitudes can discriminate between male and female shoppers.

Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Lana Dalley (bio) Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing by Krista Lysack; pp. 238. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2008. $26.95 paper. $46.95 cloth. In the opening pages of Come Buy, Come Buy, Krista Lysack asks a question that modern readers of Jane Eyre have undoubtedly wondered themselves: would Jane's trousseau shopping experience have been more enjoyable if she had been shopping "on her own terms" rather than Rochester's? In its rich interdisciplinary analysis of imaginative literature, cultural practices, and archival documents, Come Buy, Come Buy persuasively answers its opening question with a resounding yes. The book begins with one of the most memorable shopping scenes in Victorian fiction, in which Rochester takes Jane Eyre dress shopping at a silk warehouse in the neighbouring industrial town of Millcote. As Lysack demonstrates, Jane "proves an unwilling and resistant shopper" (1) as she renounces not only the extravagant gowns and diamond necklaces offered by Rochester but also the challenges to her autonomy represented by Rochester's consumer advances. Arguing that shopping can be a way for women to consolidate economic agency in a manner that incorporates rather than renounces consumer culture, Lysack's account of Jane Eyre's shopping practices charmingly introduces the book's analysis of consumer culture and female subjectivity in Goblin Market, Lady Audley's Secret, Middlemarch, Michael Field's Sight and Song, and the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women. Beginning with a theoretically informed opening chapter, Lysack grounds her argument with de Certeau's theory that consumer acts are a "potentially transformative form of cultural production" and thus everyday activities like shopping make "visible the ways in which the subject may respond to and even resist her condition under capitalism" (Lysack 7). Lysack contends that after mid-century, the cultural practice and discursive treatment of shopping shaped female subjecthood in forms "predicated on the possibilities of pleasure in the marketplace rather than disavowal" (8). She resists the critical tendency to characterize the Victorian woman shopper as enacting a cultural anxiety about unregulated consumption. Such approaches, she contends, hinge on the notion that for women, shopping represents an either/or binary, in which consumer activity signifies necessary excess, cast as either transgressive idleness or consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy, on the other hand, makes it clear that for Victorian women shoppers, the marketplace was not only a site of potential danger but also one of pleasure. The book is divided into two sections. The first three chapters examine the articulation of female urban consumerism in literary texts and cultural practices from the 1860s through the 1880s; the final two chapters treat the political and aesthetic negotiation of women's consumer culture from 1890s to World War I. One of the book's clear strengths is Lysack's treatment of shopping as not only a register for commercial economies, but also, in a more [End Page 168] symbolic way, a register for libidinal, imperial, and specular economies. In her nuanced treatment of Goblin Market, for example, Lysack argues that "gazing in an exotic goblin marketplace becomes the basis for women to formulate desires of their own" (29). By historically situating the poem within the emerging cultural practice of window-shopping, Lysack convincingly demonstrates that "within the marketplace"—goblin and otherwise—"desire is first produced ... through technologies of looking" (41). In the most excitingly original chapter of the book, Lysack examines the function of specular economies in Michael Field's Sight and Song. Lysack argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (as Michael Field) strategically arrange the poems within Sight and Song to produce the effect of "shared pleasure rather than possession," thus rejecting the gaze of masculine specular economies enacted in fin-de-siècle aestheticism (111). This sophisticated rendering of symbolic economies would have been a welcome framework for the chapter on Middlemarch, which seems less theoretically developed than the others. While any scholar who takes on Middlemarch is to be applauded for the undertaking, Lysack's connection between Eliot's terms for the publication of Middlemarch (although quite interesting...

Servicing Modernity: White Women Shop Workers on the Rand and Changing Gendered Respectabilities, 1940s–1970s1

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the National Party raised the problem of black workers entering shop and clerical work. It argued for the introduction of job reservation in the sector because of ...

WOMEN SHOPPERS IN CYPRUS- BEHAVIOUR, BELIEFS AND PERCEPTIONS OF SELF

This research aims to study the theoretical context of female shopping behaviour, to define its nature in Cyprus and to identify its factors and underlying causes The academic and scientific value of the research lies primarily in its focus and depth which allow both the profiling of a gender-specific single stage of the consumer behaviour process (women’s shopping), but also its multi-perspective comprehension through the interrelation of constituent factors and behavioural motivators. The research offers further value to business knowledge through its prescriptive conclusions on retailing applications and general marketing practice. The methodology is largely founded upon a phenomenological paradigm, which was deemed best towards understanding the human behavior from the participant’s own perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to allow accurate scientific quantification and measurement where possible; and subjective insights and indepth comprehension of attitudes and perceptions where necessary. The findings show an intensely hedonistic behaviour among women shoppers, which demands for special marketing focus on retailing; both in terms product retailers’ choice and in terms of retailers’ design and customer logistics. Additionally women self-perception in terms of advertising and stereotypes’ influence was found to contradict diachronic beliefs of marketing practice and research.

Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City

Antebellum business clerks embodied the economic dreams of an optimistic era. According to the republic's cultural logic, they would eventually become merchants, sliding into positions of proprietorship or partnership that connoted independent manhood. Yet the booms and busts endemic to the period's economy challenged these expectations, making for uncertain advancement in the competitive commercial sphere. As mercantile firms specialized, clerks' work tasks expanded to include porters' duties and selling goods to female consumers. This shift was accompanied by a profound disjuncture between the ways that clerks and their contemporaries conceived of "white-collar" work. Clerks feared that moving goods alongside Irish and African American porters threatened their paths to proprietorship or partnership. Their contemporaries emphasized their interactions with women shoppers, relationships that were doubly fraught with peril. Clerks were a threat to women because they had mastered the art of commercial and sexual seduction. On the other hand, their masculinity was endangered by their proximity to women's goods and failure to work with their hands. Americans in the urban northeast were ultimately unable to reconcile the experiences of clerks' labor with competing and shifting notions of manliness and respectability. While clerks exposed disturbing contradictions about class and gender identity for all white, middle-class men, as an occupational group they were ultimately cast from the ranks of the refined and the masculine in the antebellum era.

Goblin Markets: Victorian Women Shoppers at Liberty’s Oriental Bazaar

In a Max Beerbohm caricature, a fashionably dressed Dante Gabriel Rossetti implores his plain sister, Christina, to choose something more fetching to wear (see Figure 1). The Rossettis are apparent...

Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siecle France (review)

Mass consuming, according to Tiersten, was a greater cultural problem in France than in the other great powers because the ideology of individualism was weaker. Republicanism occupied the political space that liberalism did in Britain, Germany, or the United States, with the result that virtue and self-sacrifice were more important values than self assertion. Consuming by women, whose idealized role was limited to republican motherhood, was particularly problematical. At the same time, Tiersten acknowledges, the expression of taste was an extremely important feature of Frenchness. In this fascinating study, Tiersten works out how Third Republic France became ideologically reconciled to women shoppers in department stores. The route was through the acceptance of aesthetic individualism.

Shopping in Jenin: women, homes and political persons in the Galilee

For the past fifteen years, Palestinian women from the Galilee, who are citizens of Israel, have been going to Jenin, a large town in the West Bank, in order to shop. These excursions have profoundly modified home life, gender relations, and domestic and political identities. This paper examines the very processes by which women's shopping activities significantly contribute to the making and transformation of the household and social roles. Moreover, this new mobility among women has spurred both men and women in the Galilee to reflect upon citizenship, nationalism, and modernity. Thus an in–depth analysis of shopping provides insights on the relationship between consumption and social production, on the one hand, and political identities on the other. [Consumption, shopping, women, Israel, Palestinians]

All the world and her husband: women in twentieth-century consumer culture

Introduction, Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot all world and her husband - Daily Mail, 1896-1936, Deborah Ryan new disciplines for women and rise of chain store in 1930s, Janice Winship modernity tamed? women shoppers and rationalization of consumption in interwar period, Mica Nava the greatest invention of century - menstruation in visual and maternal culture, Alia Al-Khalidi historical romance and consumption of erotic, 1918-1939, Sallie McNamara material girl? adolescent girls and culture, 1920-1958, Penny Tinkler Mrs Housewife and her grocer - advent of self-service food shopping in Britain, Barbara Usherwood decisions in DIY -women, home-improvements and advertising in postwar Britain, Jen Browne seen on TV - design and domestic economy, Alison Clarke advertising difference - women and consumer citizenship in Western Europe, Anne Cronin strange bedfellows - feminism and advertising, Mary M. Talbot thanks for stopping by - gender and virtual intimacy in American shop-by-television, Mary Bucholtz a self off shelf? consuming women's empowerment, Deborah Cameron fashioning career woman - power-dressing as a strategy of consumption, Joanne Entwistle non-occasion cards and commodification of personal relationships, Jane Hobson girl power and postmodern fan at Boyzone conferences, Maggie Andrews and Rosie Whorlow.

Petite and tall‐sized consumer segmentation: Comparison of fashion involvement, pre‐purchase clothing satisfaction and clothing needs

This study investigated fashion involvement, pre‐purchase clothing satisfaction and clothing needs of petite and tall‐sized consumers. The differences between petite and tall‐sized consumers were compared, and the relationship among the three variables was examined. Petite and tall‐sized women's shopping characteristics were identified. The data were obtained through mail survey method. The final sample consisted of 177 petite and 144 tall women. Data were statistically analysed to fulfil the purpose of the study. Descriptive statistics, such as frequency, mean and standard deviation, were utilised to define the characteristics of the sample. Analysis of variance was tested to compare beliefs about clothing attributes. T‐test and analysis of covariance were utilised to determine if there is any difference between petite and tall women in terms of fashion involvement, pre‐purchase clothing satisfaction and clothing needs. Pearson Product Moment Correlation and Pearson Partial Correlation Coefficient were utilised to test the hypotheses. The results indicated significant but relatively low relationships among fashion involvement, pre‐purchase clothing satisfaction and clothing needs. Fashion involvement and clothing needs were positively correlated, while pre‐purchase clothing satisfaction and clothing needs were negatively correlated for both petite and tall‐sized women.

The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street

In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters - Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop - placed their images of modern new women. Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists.Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the new woman's relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.

The downtown department store as a social force

While the downtown department store was a commercial phenomenon it was also a social force. In particular, it reintegrated women into the downtown. Women shoppers used these stores to identify the public and secondary relationship orientations of urbanism.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia among 300 suburban women shoppers.

Of 300 female shoppers who responded to a questionnaire on anorexia nervosa and bulimia, 0.7% reported a history of anorexia nervosa and 10.3% reported a history of bulimia. The data support the belief that these disorders may be increasing in prevalence.

The “Imageries” of Department Stores

What is it that really constitutes a store's “image”? How do downtown department stores and suburban department stores differ in imagery? Here are the highlights of a study of the shopping attitudes of 4,500 women shoppers — the different types of appeal in department stores, the different customer characteristics, differences in shopping behavior, and differences between the imagery of suburban branch department stores and their “parent” stores in the city.