Chapter 2

Women and Shopping in America

Any book about shopping for American women must consider how women’s lives have changed. What are the differences between the lives of women at the beginning of the new millennia and the lives of their mothers and grandmothers? Indeed we really ought to start back with the “Founding Mothers” of America. What was shopping all about for them? Where did they shop? How did they shop? Was shopping an important part of their lives? Fortunately, books and articles written by American historians and consumer researchers can tell us quite a bit about earlier times.

In this chapter we present a brief history of women and shopping and how the nature of shopping has developed in Western societies.

A Brief History ...

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