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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Reinventing The Body Politic: Women, Consumer Culture, and Civic Identity from Suffrage to the New Deal Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wv1m5t3 Author Bufalino, Jamie Mayhew Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Reinventing The Body Politic: Women, Consumer Culture, and Civic Identity From Suffrage to the New Deal A Dissertation Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Jamie Mayhew Bufalino December 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Brian Lloyd, Chairperson Dr. Catherine Allgor Dr. Molly McGarry Copyright by Jamie Mayhew Bufalino 2009 The Dissertation of Jamie Mayhew Bufalino is approved: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I extend my appreciation to the many people who have helped me in the process of creating this work. I have benefited from the assistance of librarians at the University of California, Riverside, Duke University, Oregon State University, and Willamette University. I am indebted to the wonderful staff of the interlibrary loan department at UCR who were always eager to seek out even the most obscure of sources. Professors Catherine Allgor and Molly McGarry have been a great source of support, providing advice and encouragement throughout the long writing process. My thinking and writing skills have benefited greatly from the recommendations of dissertation committee chair, Professor Brian Lloyd. I feel very fortunate to have had so encouraging and diligent an advisor. My dissertation is certainly greatly improved by his advice. I am thankful for the love of my family, especially Mary Mayhew, John and Pam Mayhew, Chuck and Patricia Bufalino, Jackie and Mike Rogers, Jeanne Bufalino and Charles Bufalino, who have supported my efforts to balance my academic pursuits with family life. This dissertation would surely never have been completed without the unwavering support of my husband, Michael Bufalino, who viewed this dissertation as our fourth child and always understood how essential my studies are to my sense of myself and thus to my happiness. To all of you and to the many others I have neglected to mention, thank you. iv Dedication To my daughters Lily, Emma and Rachel Bufalino who have generously shared their childhood with this dissertation. .As I complete this dissertation just days before my daughter Lily’s 10 th birthday, I wonder if I’d have pursued graduate school if I’d known how long it would take. I’m glad I didn’t know. v Abstract ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reinventing the Body Politic: Women, Consumer Culture, and Civic Identity From Suffrage to the New Deal by Jamie Mayhew Bufalino Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, December 2009 Dr. Brian Lloyd, Chairperson “Reinventing the Body Politic: Women, Consumer Culture, and Civic Identity from Suffrage to the New Deal” argues that social feminists of the 1920s found in consumer culture a means through which to create a model of female political participation that was consistent both with their own ideals and pervasive images of modern womanhood accepted by most Americans. By adopting the images, and methods of consumer culture in their rhetoric, women’s political organizations attempted to wrap a new political identity for women in the familiar trappings of consumer culture. In so doing, they solidified the transformation of twentieth-century political culture from its roots in local political party machines to a modern form in which national public relations professionals and issue-based lobbies dominated. vi My dissertation unites social feminism and consumer culture through the notion of the consumerist compromise. Striking an intermediate path using the tenets of consumer culture, social feminists argued that modern consumer conveniences granted women the free time to pursue interests outside the home, that women’s status as consumers made them vital to the national economy, and that the complexities of modern industrial life blurred the lines between domestic and public spheres making politics increasingly significant to the quality of women’s lives. Social feminist organizations accepted this image of modern American womanhood as a public relations strategy designed to increase female voter participation and, in turn, their leverage as lobbyists. The consumerist compromise helped social feminists’ usher in a modern American liberalism consistent with their progressive social reform agenda and in which they served as experts in labor relations, industrial health and safety, and child welfare. Their success during the New Deal was the culmination of these efforts and reflected both their lasting impact on American politics and the limits of their political power. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ iv Dedication........................................................................................................................... v Abstract.............................................................................................................................. vi Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1........................................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2........................................................................................................................... 69 Chapter 3......................................................................................................................... 115 Chapter 4......................................................................................................................... 165 Chapter 5......................................................................................................................... 216 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 296 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 310 viii Introduction “For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rumination about reality expressed the sense of uncertainty both lamented and celebrated in the 1920s by a group of avant-garde American writers collectively know as the “Lost Generation.” 2 Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the interwar period, which captured the growing pains of a nation moving swiftly into modernity, was founded on a profound disillusionment with the Western values that had dominated American culture since the nineteenth century, including the Victorian faith in technological and scientific progress as a force for good, the Protestant notion of the perfectibility of humanity through hard work, and white chauvinism as a justification for colonialism and segregation. The horrors of World I revealed the fallacy of these values to a generation of young writers forced to witness and participate in the unprecedented scale, brutality, and fruitlessness of modern warfare. While most Americans did not view the interwar period as the complete cultural schism that members of “The Lost Generation” did, many social critics including historian Frederick Lewis Allen and sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd shared Fitzgerald’s view that the 1920s was a period of significant cultural change in which Victorian social norms competed for dominance with a modern consumer-based culture. 3 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale of the dangers of a world rooted in the shallow foundation of consumer culture, the metaphorical fairy-wings 1 described above. Like modern advertisements, the novel is peopled primarily by the young, the beautiful, and the wealthy. Lacking any sort of binding moral code, the title character Jay Gatsby attempts to live up to the vision of himself he developed in late adolescence. As advertisers create a demand for their products by placing them within a social tableaux, an appealing vignette that suggests through visual queues social status, emotion, and moral value, so too were Gatsby’s manner of dress and speech, his lavish parties and, in particular, his luxurious home intended to illicit the desire of his obsession, Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald critiques Gatsby’s notion that one can make over one’s life simply by recreating one’s image – the founding principle of consumer culture – as Gatsby’s dream of happiness with Daisy proves not only unattainable but also destructive to himself and others. The dawn of modernity in The Great Gatsby is characterized as much by the decline of nineteenth-century Victorian social mores as by the rise of modern consumer culture. Fitzgerald fails to mourn the demise of a nineteenth-century ideology in which industrialization rendered humanity cogs whose moral value was determined by their place within