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Maternal consumption: A view from the past

Children’s clothes are an appropriate topic for examining maternal consumption, as they are among the first items provided for infants and must be frequently replaced to accommodate growth, requiring repeated consumption decisions. For contemporary mothers, decisions about clothing may act as a way of defining their parenting practice both to their children and to adult peers, and anxieties about this role may be heightened by the characterization of commercial interests as corrupters of childhood innocence. As Dan Cook has noted, the disjuncture between theories of consumption and the historiography of childhood is a major problem, with the origins of contemporary practices largely unexamined. Thus there is scope for examining maternal consumption in the past in order to illuminate parallels and disjunctures with contemporary practices and issues around maternal consumption. This article examines the role of mothers in providing children’s clothing in Britain from 1890–1914, in a society that was both fixated on consumption as a sign of social status and increasingly concerned about correct methods of mothering. It is framed by a review of some of the main themes and anxieties raised by contemporary studies of maternal consumption. It then examines 19th-century texts addressed to mothers to establish how maternal provision of clothing was conceptualized. These reveal a divergence between the promotion of the pleasures of consumption in dressmaking magazines such as Letts’s Illustrated Household Magazine, Madame Schild’s Shilling Dress Patterns and Myra’s Mid-Monthly Journal and Children’s Fashions and the counsels of restraint in childrearing manuals and wardrobe management guides. Texts addressing the needs of working-class families, such as school textbooks, linked clothing consumption with improving child health and rationalizing scarce resources of time and money. The extent to which consumption practices reflected these competing sources of advice is evaluated through an analysis of school group photographs. A case study of the pinafores commonly worn by young schoolgirls draws out the ways in which this garment embodied social meanings. This leads to reflections on the relevance of these findings for contemporary investigations of maternal consumption.