Overview

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 became an integral part of being a teenager. This nascent consumer – always a white, middle-class, heterosexual high school student – had 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. Katharine Rollwagen dives into consumer magazines, Eaton's archives, and mail-order catalogues to discover how the commercialized Canadian teenager was created. Packed with insights about how retailers and advertisers attempted to shape the look, bodies, and behaviour of young Canadians, this is an intriguing look at 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.

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9780774869898

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Reviews

""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.""-- ""Cynthia Comacchio, FRSC, professor emerita of history, Wilfrid Laurier University"" ""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.""-- ""Donica Belisle, professor of history, University of Regina""

Author Information

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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