The adage "Consumption, thy name is woman" resonates with such venerable authority that one might expect to find it cited in
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations , attributed to some Victorian savant or to an eminent critic of modern frippery. In Western
societies, acts of exchange and consumption have long been obsessively gendered, usually as female. As the speculative bubbles
of early-eighteenth-century capitalism burst, pamphleteering moralists excoriated the feminine volatility of nascent credit
schemes and decried the foppish new rich. In scenes set in late-nineteenth-century French, British, and American department
stores, novelists imagined that goods enraptured buyers, who fantasized about and fondled them before finally taking possession.
Modernist intellectuals disparaged commercial mass culture as venal and vaporous, bewitching its customers with mercenary
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blandishments. Commercial artists sprawl idealized female figures across twentieth-century advertising copy, designing their
forms and faces to elicit desirous gazes. And marketing agents probe the calculations and caprices imputed to Mrs. Consumer to
survey the entity of household spending.