Fraud by Balleisen Edward J.;

Author:Balleisen, Edward J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 9.1: A BBB poster beseeching investors to remain vigilant in the face of post–World War II investment and charity frauds. W. Dan Bell Papers, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection. Reproduced with permission.

Some of the most insistent post–World War II pleas for combating business fraud came from middle-class women, who took advantage of the growing tendency of economic discourse to feminize “the consumer” by picturing this abstract individual as a middle-class housewife. Cultural linkage of American household consumption to female decision-making had longstanding origins. The nineteenth-century birth of consumer education was bound up with the invention of home economics, a highly gendered undertaking. Mail-order houses, early department stores, and advertising agencies all directed marketing to potential female purchasers.45 But the equation of women with consumption decisions became even more common after World War II, as the figure of “Mrs. Consumer” became a common stand-in for the spending public, addressed in ads, referenced in the business pages, and depicted in antifraud literature, such as an early 1950s BBB poster that showed a skeptical housewife deflating the confidence of a door-to-door salesman by invoking the need to check out his firm with the local Bureau (Figure 9.2). “Mrs. Consumer” took on the gloss of the capitalist economy’s true sovereign, the maker or breaker of corporate profitability. Through mounting consumer complaints to businesses, BBBs, and government officials, middle-class women deployed this rhetoric with regard to numerous consumer issues, including deceptive marketing. They organized as well, joining myriad neighborhood organizations that lent popular heft to consumerism.46

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