Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France

This volume examines the emergence of a citizen consumer role for women during postwar modernization and reconstruction in France, integrating the history of economic modernization with that of women and the family. This role both celebrated the power of the woman consumer and created a gendered form of citizenship that did not disrupt the sexual hierarchy of home, polity and marketplace. Redefining needs and renegotiating concepts of taste, value and thrift, women and their families drove mass consumer society through their demands and purchases at the same time that their very need to consume came to define them.