Art in the Parlor: Consumer Culture and Currier and Ives

The development of the modern American economy took a major leap forward in the midnineteenth century. The American economy moved dramatically in the direction of mass production and expanded product advertising, prompting the development of a modern consumer culture. Feeding those developments was a shift of production from the home to the factory, which was accompanied by greater emphasis on the home as sanctuary and source of moral and spiritual renewal. The domestic sphere became women's domain, and women purchased an increasingly large number of items produced outside the home that would support their particular identities and missions, including popular art. Popular culture was coming into its own, fed by the same forces of economic development. This article describes the role Currier and Ives played in this aspect of nineteenth-century consumer culture. Changes in the Home and Consumer Culture At the start of the nineteenth century about eighty percent of Americans lived on farms, where women were integral parts of the family agricultural business, and which were sites of both production and consumption. Families produced most of what they consumed, including not only food, but also a long list of other commodities, from soap to clothing and from alcohol to medicine. By the end of the century, families-even farm families-produced far fewer of their own consumables, and production had largely shifted from the home to factories (Husband and O'Loughlin 99). Americans began to think of the home as a sanctuary from the commercial world, a place where "women were to nurture their harried husbands, educate their children, and compensate for a spiritually impoverished world outside of the home" (Husband and O'Loughlin 99). American families became more wage dependent, and wives, rather than husbands, became the leading domestic consumers in the United States. A "regendering of consumer agency" occurred (Witkowski 263; Schlereth 141). As Terrence Witkowski put it, women became consumer agents, "actively seeking, learning about and wanting new things; initiating and influencing household decision-making; and dealing with merchants, bringing things home, and then managing their consumption" (262-63). Such changes are seldom uniform. And in the United States this transformation of the American economy and consumer culture varied in time and place and according to social class, race, and ethnicity. But as the century wore on, most Americans had more money and free time to purchase a greater number of mass-produced and comparatively inexpensive goods (Schlereth 141; see also Blumin). As Mary Ryan found, nineteenth-century middle-class households were "vitally connected with the advances of both the marketplace and the factories" and served as "the targeted destination for a voluminous flow of consumer goods," all of which was facilitated by the appearance of mass advertising (198-200). The result was nothing short of what Simon N. Patten recognized in 1907 as a "new basis of civilization" (Schlereth 142). Much has been written on the origin and evolution of the women's sphere in the nineteenth century, perhaps adequately summarized in 1869 in a phrase from the women's magazine, The Household, in an article titled, "Women's Relations to the State": "Woman is the divinely commissioned teacher of her race" (qtd. in Husband and O'Loughlin 101). A major component of her commission was creating an appropriately protective and nurturing home environment for her family. In this new world, men labored outside the home in the sometimes dangerous and morally destructive society that many feared was developing in industrial, commercial America. He did it for family and country, and his reward was the home. "Domestic environmentalism" attempted "to bring the majority of Americans under the sway of bourgeois culture," as some would put it, while others saw it as "a project for the edification of the masses" (Grier 5-8; Rotskoff 41). …