Waste and Want
A Social History of Trash
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life--throwing things out--and how it has transformed American society.
Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture--the trash it produces--and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.
Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change--the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale.
Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on who's counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Nothing is inherently trash," claims Strasser (Satisfaction Guaranteed) in this vibrant social history of American attitudes toward superfluous or unusable material items. Before the 20th century--when mass production, post-WWII consumer culture and planned obsolescence created a society in which disposability was the norm--broken crockery, food, buttons, bones, fat, rags, tin, paper and other refuse were precious commodities, especially in areas of urban or rural poverty. Drawing on the work of such anthropologists as Mary Douglas, Thorsten Veblen and Claude L vi-Strauss, of social critics like Jacob Riis and of such authors as Lydia Maria Child (whose popular The American Frugal Housewife was published in 1829), Strasser demonstrates how the designation "trash" exposes underlying attitudes about class, race, ethnicity, patriotism, survival, religion and art. Perceptively noting the intersections between capitalism, consumerism, industrialization and class mobility, the book spills over with fascinating facts--for instance, in 1830, 10,000 hogs roamed Manhattan's streets eating garbage and providing food for the poor. It also offers revealing analyses of why many Jewish immigrants went into the rag business; how "trash" is gendered and how sanitary napkins became emblematic of the new disposable consumer culture. The chapters on the ultra-patriotic scrap drives of WWI and II--particularly Strasser's observations on how the U.S. government encouraged spying on those who "hoarded" scrap metal--are illuminating and prove her point that "trash" is always more than it appears.
