Carried Away

The Invention of Modern Shopping

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by Rachel Bowlby

Columbia University Press

Due/Published September 2002, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0231122756

New in paper (F02)

Asserting that a history of shopping was, until recently, a history of women, Bowlby examines here the evolution of the modern shopper. She uses a blend of history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism to explore the rise of department stores and supermarkets of the United States, France, and Great Britain.

Bowlby first recalls the early days of these institutions. In the mid-nineteenth century, when department stores first developed, their fabulous new buildings brought middle-class women into town, where they could indulge in what was then a new activity: a day´s shopping. The stores offered luxury, flattering women into believing that they belonged in a beautiful environment. It is here, Bowlby argues, that the idea of the modern woman´s passion for fashion and shopping took hold. 

Developed in the twentieth century, supermarkets took an opposite tack: they offered functionality, standardization, and cheapness. However, Bowlby claims, despite their differences, the two institutions belong together as emblematic of their respective eras´ social developments: the department store with the growth of cities, the supermarket with the proliferation of suburbs. With their dazzling lights and displays, both supermarkets and department stores were thought to produce in females an enhanced or trance-like state of mind.

"Rachel Bowlby is a scintillating analyst of the hidden meanings of that activity which so pre-eminently defines our culture - shopping.Carried Away traces the transformations in the shopper from the days of the glamorous department store to our own functionalist superstores and tells us not a little about the changing roles of women and men along the way. It's a 'must read' for our consuming culture."--Lisa Appignanesi