"Agents wanted" [electronic resource] : sales, gender, and the making of consumer markets in America, 1830-1930
Keywords: History.

"'Agents Wanted': Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830-1930" is a history of capitalism and a gender history that explores both a business model and women's conflicted engagement with it. The agency method of distributing consumer goods became widespread during the nineteenth century. With a gathering force in the antebellum decades and real abandon after the Civil War, entrepreneurs recruited individuals into agency networks and assigned them territories in which to cultivate demand for new kinds of mass-produced consumer goods—lavishly illustrated books, family magazines, engravings, patent medicines, and more. Agents not only persuaded people to buy but as independent contractors they also shouldered risks and carried out quotidian economic practices that enabled businesses to function. This dissertation examines three sites where agency distribution was particularly visible—the periodical, subscription book, and patent medicine industries. The agency economy recruited diverse participants into the work of selling. It offered possibilities not only to men struggling to make their way in a changing economy but also to women. In the gender-segmented and highly unequal nineteenth-century labor market, it provided a rare venue that valued the labor of men and women equally. It kindled hopes for economic independence and offered a tool for salvaging a productive home-based family economy. While most agents were men, women's minority perspective illuminates how the system functioned and how appeals to older cultural values both facilitated new economic developments and came under pressure. Women found bridges into agency work in cultural practices of hospitality, patronage, and charity to widows and via fraternal networks. They experienced obstacles as well, including negative class and moral associations. After 1870, their selling coincided with increased agitation for woman suffrage and temperance and a movement towards a freer and more commodified sexuality. These historical conjunctions of politics, sexuality, and economics informed women's interaction with selling and entrepreneurs' efforts to attract sales workers. The agency model changed over time. In the periodical industry, distinct distribution channels developed, including a system of clubbing that rewarded women's sales labor with consumer goods. After the Civil War, entrepreneurs, including E.C. Allen, elaborated agency, using advertising, merchandise premiums, and inexpensive second-class postal rates to recruit masses of agents and transform their names into commodities. With agents' help, periodical publishers built nationwide readerships, platforms that other entrepreneurs used to fulfill distribution dreams. A case study of the Viavi Company shows a patent medicine concern and its female sales workers shaping agency into direct selling—the purview of companies like Avon Products, Inc.—and in the process forwarding a commercial maternalism. Cultural representations of sellers played a role in agency transformations. Stereotypes of male and female book agents informed women's approach to selling while working to limn sales as a male pathway to business success. The comedic trope of the female drummer, or commercial traveler, evolved in ways that helped to alleviate concerns about women's ability to balance work and domestic life. In revisiting this nearly forgotten business meaning of the word "agency, " this project makes gender central to the new history of capitalism and illuminates the importance of the small-scale actions of sometimes unlikely economic actors.