This book
focuses on middle-class urban women as
participants in new forms of
consumer culture. Within the
special world of the
department store, women found
themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired,
but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the
working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way
in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions..
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