"More than a history of social change and shoplifting. It is a study of consumer culture and technological
change, class privilege and gender roles in transition, female criminality and social control....Interesting, well-written,
and informative."
--American Journal of Sociology
"[An] intelligent and intriguing probe into the social history of American shoplifting....A fascinating story,
replete with evidence of changing and intersecting class and gender relationships. The author tells it inventively
and well."
--The Journal of American History
"Unlike social theorists who view industrial capitalism as a resolute march toward modernity, Ableson offers
a far more sophisticated and complex interpretation....Exceptionally provocative and well-conceived."
--Business History Review
"Interesting and well-written....Well put together and suggestive."
--American Historical Review
"Abelson offers fresh material...in her lively and eminently readable social history of shoplifting in the
United States and, tangentially, Europe....Students of developments and transmutation of gender stereotypes of
modern capitalist society will love this book--as will those who ponder the meaning of the glittering and far-flung
shopping malls of our own time. Abelson's trenchant comments also illuminate the history of labeling in deviance
and its interconnections with social and economic interests."
--Contemporary Sociology
Oxford University Press Web Site, March, 2000
Summary
This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special
world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many
succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available.
Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson
argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those
of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of
kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the
general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed
proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.
