When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store
by Elaine S. Abelson
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Description
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. The author argues that in the interest of show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Recommendations
nessreader okay zola is writing a novel and abelson an academic study and they are an alphabet apart. but zola is writing the retailer's point of view on the new commerce of the department store and i thought abelson was too sypathetic to her larcenous ladies. the zola gives a vivid sense of the swings and roundabouts of shop work which might enhance the dryer analysis of the history
Member Reviews
That was a strange title, no doubt. An older academic take on how shoplifting became tied up with gender and in particular pathologies that society largely believed were unique to women.
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- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, Sociology, Politics and Government
- DDC/MDS
- 364.1 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Crime Criminal offenses
- LCC
- HV6658 .A24 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Crimes and offenses
- BISAC
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- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
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