Abstract
Natalia Milanesio’s book, focused on the case of Argentina, is a timely contribution that fills a large knowledge gap in the history of consumption. It explores the changes in Argentine society triggered by the working classes’ access to mass consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this respect, the author shows not only the conditions of the formation of a collective worker-consumer identity, but also the upheavals within relations between the various social classes. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina is underpinned by three main explanations for these very significant cultural and social changes. The first concerns the role of the State, which, with the coming to power of the Perón government, strongly promoted consumption as a new domain of public action. Its intention was to boost the country’s and especially the working-class’ economic development. The second explanation relates to the strategies of the advertising industry, which targeted the working classes in an attempt to develop the market for consumer goods and equipment manufactured by local firms. The third explanation is more unexpected: based on oral history, Milanesio shows how, in individuals’ memories, a consumer-worker ethos strongly associated with the Perón era took shape, in which class identity was structured around access to mass consumption.
From this point of view, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina draws on the two main traditions in the historical study of consumption. From research focused on the emergence of consumer society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, it borrows the principle of an approach to consumption through the identification of specific stages. The historian thus considers that the second half of the twentieth century represents a significant shift in relation to the beginning of the century, precisely because this massive working-class access to consumption was to lastingly transform Argentine society. The other tradition in the historical study of consumption on which the book draws focuses on the practices and institutions that made consumption a mass phenomenon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Milanesio puts consumption at the heart of her analysis with the aim of understanding its contribution to social stratification. One of the most original contributions of her book is that it highlights the way in which the working class’ access to mass consumption was to modify profoundly relations both with the upper classes, which were to lose many of their privileges, and with the middle classes, which were more strongly affected by economic difficulties and struggled to create a distinctive identity.
The book consists of six chapters presenting various propositions around the role of the State and of advertising firms, the changes in class relations, and the shaping of a new working-class identity. The first chapter highlights the way in which the Perón government organized the conditions of working-class access to mass consumption. Whereas at the turn of the twentieth century the country had been a large exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods, in the 1940s the government set out to industrialize the country and to promote an autarchic economic system, based on a combination of loans and tariff protection. Several measures were taken to support the working classes, including wage increases, paid leave, freezing of rents, and social programs, some of which were even enshrined in the constitution of 1949. Finally, this public action was related to the organization of consumer protection via price control, the creation of consumer cooperatives, a regulation of product quality to combat fraud and falsification, a national food code, and a food police force.
But as the author points out, such changes induced by public action would not have been possible without the private sector’s cooperation. This is clearly shown in Chapters Two and Three. The historian describes how advertising experts, who until then had focused essentially on the wealthiest classes, gradually constituted consumers from the working classes as a social and cultural category. In the 1940s the advertising profession sought to become more familiar with the habits of the working classes, not only in the cities but throughout the country. At the same time, the large department stores in cities sought to expand their clientele by advertising in local newspapers. Women were the main targets, as advertisers endeavored to turn them into wise and demanding consumers. In this respect they echoed the consumer education actions of the Perón government. Milanesio explores the content of advertisements, to show how working-class consumers gradually influenced not only the language but also the mediums and visuals used in advertising. In the 1950s, adverts increasingly displayed the new values of consumer goods, such as nationalism, functionality, and utility. These values were presented as being deeply entrenched in the working-class world and departed from the messages celebrating wealth and social status that had previously been intended for the upper classes. The worker and his wife thus became the characters in these advertising messages.
Chapter Four shows how this advent of the worker-consumer changed relations between the social classes. Opponents of the Perón government, from the upper classes, were increasingly reluctant to share their places of leisure and consumption with the working classes. The same applied to the urban space and to transport systems that could no longer cater to the growing populations of cities in the late 1940s. At the time, a market study concluded that there were no fundamental differences in preferences for products between the different social strata of the Argentine population. Paradoxically, these same working classes were criticized by opponents of the Perón government for their consumption practices deemed to be ostentatious, whereas the middle classes, more affected than were workers by inflation, saw their buying power eroded considerably.
Milanesio draws on press archives to explore in Chapter Five the way in which these trends profoundly affected gender relations. The media sought to describe and often to criticize how working-class women’s aspirations to consumer freedom prompted them to put off getting married until they were older and to look for work rather than being housewives. Eva Perón popularized the model of the free woman, capable of social ascension, along with a model of the frivolous woman. How do working-class Argentinians who lived through that particular period in the 1940s see it?
This is the question that the last chapter of the book addresses, based on testimonies gathered by the author from individuals who were between 20 and 30 years old at the time. More than a history, it is the memory of that period that the author reconstructs, using the methods of oral history. She shows how the workers interpreted these new consumer practices in their contribution to the construction of a class affiliation. The Perón period, mentioned as the one that allowed mass access to certain consumer goods such as sewing machines or refrigerators, was then associated with a profound change in workers’ ability to forge their own class identity. In the epilogue, Milanesio shows the extent to which this identity has remained a structuring force to the present day, despite the profound changes and economic and political crises that Argentina has since experienced.
Workers Go Shopping in Argentina proposes a refreshing journey to the heart of Argentina in the Perón period. Using both workers’ testimonies and media or advertising archives, Milanesio provides us with a history of the working class’ access to mass consumption, which had hardly been documented until now. She shows not only the central role that public policy played, but also the profound changes in class identities and boundaries. It seems regrettable that the book only episodically mentions the role played by retailers, from the small shop to the department store, the cooperative or the exchange systems that probably played an important part in the construction of a class identity. The fact remains that this book provides a welcome contribution to bridging the knowledge gap around a history of Argentine consumption that was waiting to be written.