The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar
The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar
Creating the Youth Market in Mid-Century Canada
Co-ed, junior miss, grad, teenster. From the late 1930s to the 1950s, the teenager emerged as a distinct and ideal market segment. The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar explores how consumption and commodities became integral parts of being a teenager.
This nascent consumer – always a white, middle-class, heterosexual high school student – was authoritative, competent, and opinionated, with purchasing power that demanded recognition. At least, that was the image fashioned by Canadian advertisers and retailers, and especially the biggest department store of the time: Eaton’s. Using evidence from Eaton’s archives, mail-order catalogues, and consumer magazines, Katharine Rollwagen traces the making of the Canadian teenager through back-to-school specials, beauty contests, fashion shows, fads, specialty shops, and special size ranges. In advertisements, promotions, stores, and schools, the teenager was both a desirable customer and a valued commodity. Eaton’s even went so far as to establish junior advisory councils drawn from high school student bodies.
Packed with insights about how retailers and advertisers attempted to shape the look, bodies, and behaviour of young Canadians, this intriguing book illuminates the power of corporate actors to influence popular understandings of growing up. It also reveals the roots of the hyper-consumerism common among young people today.
This lively account of the not-so-distant past will resonate widely with Canadians who have a keen interest in history, marketing, fashion, and popular culture. It also brings new insight to childhood and youth studies, consumer culture, Canadian history, media studies, and business history for scholars and students.
An impressive contribution to the histories of youth and consumer culture, The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar shows how the two emerged in relation with each other
In this engaging book, Rollwagen provides a close reading of an impressive array of primary sources, informed by the theoretical insights of cultural and media studies, but always with an eye to the historical context that is so important to ground those insights.
Katharine Rollwagen is a professor in the history department of Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and a grateful guest on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. Her work has appeared in the Urban History Review, Histoire sociale/Social History, Historical Studies in Education, and the Canadian Historical Review.
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