Household Choices as Politics and Pleasure in 1950s Canada

Abstract

We live our domestic lives in the presence of objects. Through our relations with them, we appraise, assimilate, appropriate, and resist the currents of our time, in a warm and willful dialogue between self and other. As goods change, and times change, so does this cultural traffic between householders and their goods change—in dominant direction, in relative intensity, in the character of the burden it carries, and in the significance we allow this burden to assume. How much material goods matter in the social and individual reckoning of well-being varies historically, and within a given time, by nation, class, and gender. How much consumption matters is a cultural difference, a shared national predicament, a politics grounded in the circumstances of class, and learned as a gendered responsibility. When producers were not paramount in the regulation of consumption, to what priorities was commerce subsidiary? How were these priorities specific by nation, gender, and class?