Making Meaning of Consumer Culture

“Charity Girls” Participate in Commercialized Leisure in Early 20th-

century New York

Preliminary Discussion

• Peiss partially maps the history of sexuality onto the landscape of early-20th-century consumer culture in New York

• Is her analysis compatible with Adorno and Horkheimer’s in “The Culture Industry”?

• How do Peiss‘ “charity girls” use opportunities for commercialized leisure?

In The Teddy Bear Factory, New York, 1915

Working women in 1907 outside of the Dix building displaying their careful attention to fashion. Photo courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Young working class women at play on the beach at Coney Island, late 19th century

Charity Girls

“working women defined as respectable, but who engaged in sexual activity” (337)– more instrumental and

flexible approach to sexual behavior.

– sexual activity differed from prostitution because no money exchanges

Sexuality and Working-Class Cultural Style

• Born or educated in the United States, many adopted cultural style meant to distance themselves from their immigrant roots and familial traditions. Such women dressed in the latest finery, negotiated city life with ease, and sought intrigue and adventure with male companions. For this group of working women, sexuality became a central dimension of their emergent culture, a dimension that is revealed in their daily life of work and leisure. (331) Lewis Hine

photograph

　 Most single working-class women were wage-earners for a few years before marriage, contributing to the household income or supporting themselves. Sexual segmentation of the labor market placed women in semi-skilled, seasonal employment with high rates of turnover. Few women earned a “living wage” . . . and the wage differential between men and women was vast. (335)

Millworkers, circa 1900

• Women’s wage labor and the demands of the working-class household offered daughters few resources for entertainment. At the same time, new commercial amusements offered a tempting world of pleasure and companionship beyond parental control. (338)

Coney Island beach goers, circa 1900

Treating• Underlying the relaxed sexual style and heterosocial interaction was

the custom of “treating.” Men often treated their female companions to drinks and refreshments, theater tickets, and other incidentals. Women might pay a dance hall’s entrance fee or carfare out to an amusement park, but they relied on men’s treats to see them through the evening’s entertainment. Such treats were highly prized by young working women. . . . (333)

Importance of Commercialized Leisure

The growth of large public dance halls, cabarets, and metropolitan amusement resorts provided an anonymous space in which the subculture of treating could flourish. (337) Coney Island postcard, n.d.

Gay New York• [G]ay men . . . built a gay

world in the city’s hotels, rooming houses, and apartment buildings, and in its cafeterias, restaurants, and speakeasies. Gay men took full advantage of the city’s resources to create zones of gay camaraderie and security. (Chauncey, 50)

New York, 1907

Cafeteria Society

• Like most young, single residents of rooming houses, gay men took most of their meals at the cheap restaurants, cafeterias, and lunch counters that dotted the city’s commercial and furnished-room districts. (Chauncey, 56)

Restaurants became places, in short, where men branded as outsiders turned themselves into insiders by creating and sharing a gay reading of the world, a distinctive, ironic, camp perspective that affirmed them and challenged the normativity of the world that branded them as abnormal. (Chauncey, 56)

• The very brilliance of the fairy left most men safely in the shadows, and made it easier for them to meet their friends in restaurants throughout the city without provoking the attention of outsiders. Gay men seized the opportunities this portended. (Chauncey,64)

From Chauncey, “Lots of Friends at the YMCA,” in Scanlon, ed., p. 47.