Rachel Bowlby – Unexpected ItemsRachel BowlbyLabel: Edinburgh University PressDescription: The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother who shopped. But whether as purchaser parent or professional women's defining identities have been transformed with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories as well as novels and tragedies from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading of all kinds of text as a historical method showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman the mother the consumer the parent all human characters clash and change and so do their likely stories.
