Growth in household income permitted average families to embrace the new culture of consumption without fear of destitution. Mass-merchandising of throwaway items of course meant massive increases in waste. But as communities grew, stores replaced the peddlers, eliminating the opportunities for exchanging used for new goods. Ironically, these were men working in a woman's world, negotiating with frontier housekeepers. On the American frontier, for example, traveling salesmen took waste items (mostly rags) in payment for new products. Constantly returning to wives and mothers as they navigate the needs and wants of their family, she extracts important observations about American values through the prism of disposal behavior over time. Instead of presenting an archaeology of garbage, as William Rathje and Cullen Murphy did with Rubbish (1992), Strasser investigates broader issues of American consumption and its evil twin, poverty. Strasser focuses primarily on the role of women in determining household behavior. Sewage treatment plants and landfills were designed to protect the public, further limiting informal scavenging and recovery. Simultaneously, social reformers achieved measures that limited traditional waste-recovery cottage industries organized largely around child labor. The most important transition came near the turn of the last century, as industrialization and the relative decline of agriculture produced a more affluent, mobile, and urbanized population in the United States. Susan Strasser's Waste and Want sits firmly astride the American transition from a culture that insisted on a simple but careful stewardship of objects to a disposable society in which consumption is patriotic. Tampons, DiposAlls, and the ever-varying tail fins of the postwar Cadillac-these are a few of the cultural artifacts that suggest America's tense and complicated relationship with consumption, poverty, and waste. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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