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November 08, 2010

Comments

Quentin Magos

What would we do without our propensity to buy stuff which we want to possess? Probably go wild while naked in the country and look for Nature as she is. But once we found her find it no cheaper to buy her goods than it ever was while stepping out in the cold old economic world that shortens life, beats us down and makes us sweat for everything we really need. It’s enough to make us want to go shopping to forget all about it.

PazzaArchitect

Great article. It's not all bad though. Department stores also had an important role to play in women's emancipation from the home and into public space:
"Department stores in their seduction of women created zones such as restaurants, rest rooms and even reading rooms where they could, towards the end of the [19th] century, go unchaperoned or certainly free of men's protection."
Elizabeth Wilson, 'The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women'

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