Summary Of Mass Consumption In Postwar America By Lizabeth Cohen

Lizabeth Cohen is a professor at Harvard University who teaches social and political topics such as popular material culture and also urban, gender, and working-class history. She is also the Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to Cohen being a professor and a dean she is also an American author, best known from one of her well-known book A Consumers’ Republic the Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, in which she discusses how mass consumption sets the tone for the social life, cultural, and political structures following World War II. She analyzes how mass consumption must undergo specific systems such as transportations, productions, advertising, and many more with the hidden cultural and social development that feed the political policies that promoted this mass consumption. Cohen argues that because

(Need a intro sentence) “A wide range of economic interests, ranging from strident anti-New Deal big businessmen to moderate and liberal capitalists to labor and its allies on the left, endorsed the importance of mass consumption to making a successful reconversion from wartime to peacetime, although each came to value mass consumption for its own reasons” (Cohen 114). To elaborate, she is trying to explain that even though a “consumers’ republic” is now born she still addresses both the positive and negatives moments of the wealthiest showing how the movement has become “weakened” and women were now back to being housewives and their new political power were now taken away from them. The G.I Bill of Rights and income tax codes were now used to entrench the economics of these white men who were homeowners. (need a sentence here to bring it together ) Mentioned throughout Chapter 5, “There is no denying that moving to suburbia improved the quality of life of many Americans, but the extent to which private real estate markets shaped postwar suburban communities over time exacerbated inequality by