Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End

Citation

Flynn, L. (2002), "Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 363-364. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2002.19.4.363.3

Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End is a number of things to a reader of the marketing persuasion. It is one part pure British history from the mid‐1800s to the early 1900s. It is one part saga of the emergence of the large retailers into a world of small specialty shops. It is one part the history of sociological consumer behavior, and it is one part feminist history. That is a lot of parts, but this is a lot of book. I am no historian, but if I had to slide this book into any one slot it would be feminist, economic history.

Erika Diane Rappaport has read, organized, and presented information from over 1,100 sources to create a close‐up view or picture of the factors precipitating and surrounding the development of the role of modern women in the public marketplace. She has sifted through this vast amount of source material and came up with six overlapping themes and issues that describe and track the transition of women and shopping in London from roughly 1860 to 1912.

The book opens with changes in the retail scene beginning around 1860 in London. The fulcrum of the revolution in retailing was one William Whiteley, the original “universal provider”. The Sam Walton of his day, William Whiteley claimed to “sell anything to anybody combining dissimilar goods in one business and offering cut price goods for cash only” (p. 17). Just as the arrival of Wal‐mart in small towns across the USA has been greeted with uproar and dismay on the part of small local retailers, the expansion of Whiteley’s emporium was greeted with unrest and effigy burning by shopkeepers in the streets of London.

Concurrent with the development of mass marketers was the expansion of the role of middle‐class women in the social life of London. Women were venturing out unchaperoned into the city. They were socializing and spending their husbands’ money. The second chapter in Shopping for Pleasure chronicles the legal confusion caused by women’s exposure to a vast array of consumer goods and by the consequential spending and overspending of household money. Women’s legal status in Great Britain in the late 1800s was completely subordinate to that of their husbands. When they bought on credit they were pledging their husbands’ assets. As bills mounted, more and more husbands challenged their legal responsibility for the debts incurred by their wives; and many shopkeepers were forced to write off many debts. This created pressure for the elevation of the legal and financial status of women to make them somehow responsible for their own spending.

Ms Rappaport also covers the concurrent push of woman’s suffrage and how that was helped along both by the growing ability of women to meet together in the city and by the shopkeepers who wanted to provide retail palaces where women could meet, relax, and spend. Women and mass merchants of London found common cause in the expanding social, financial, and political power of women.

Other chapters of the book cover the emergence of women as a social force owing to educational and social clubs and other arenas where they could meet and talk, the development of large, modern department stores, and London theatre as a driving force behind fashion and the consumption of middle class goods.

For those interested in the history of modern retailing or in the sociological foundations of modern shopping, Shopping for Pleasure is a valuable read. It relates directly to how retailing and shopping still function in today’s marketplace. The book explains that access to the marketplace is empowering to shoppers and still creates vitality in our modern economy. The theses may even have applicability for shopping on the Internet and how it may eventually affect retailing as a whole. One warning: this is a history book. Many marketing academics will be unused to this type of scholarship. The reading is fairly dry but the story is a compelling one.