Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash |
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Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
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by Susan Strasser
Sales Rank: 206339
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List Price: $17.00
$5.98
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
Published by: Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition September 1, 2000
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0805065121
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0805065121
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
Weighs: 14.4 ounces
From 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 centuryAwhen mass production, post-WWII consumer culture and planned obsolescence created a society in which disposability was the normAbroken 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 factsAfor 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 IIAparticularly Strasser's observations on how the U.S. government encouraged spying on those who "hoarded" scrap metalAare illuminating and prove her point that "trash" is always more than it appears. Agent, Mary Evans. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
The author of books on housework and the American mass market, social historian Strasser explores what America has discarded, from the period when Colonists valued everything up to today's era of public landfills. She chronicles how mass production, technological change, ideals of cleanliness, and style have altered America's attitudes toward stewardship and throwing things out. Since paper production in the early days required the addition of scarce rags and scraps, people used paper sparingly. But while Henry Ford's Model T was meant to last, competitor General Motors's yearly model changes heralded a consumer culture that venerated the new. Strasser's well-sourced text, replete with attributions from women's magazines, indicates that genre's evolution from frugal housekeeper's counselor to consumer culture adjunct. Beginning as a countercultural environmental movement in the late 1960s, recycling had begun to enter the mainstream by the 1980s. The book ends on the promising note that "profligacy may one day be understood as a stage of development." Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries.AElaine Machleder, Bronx, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Hardcover)
This book is a history of household waste in the United States and what we have done with it over the years. Although Strasser takes her research as far back as colonial times, most of the focus is on the habits of the Nineteenth Century, and how they evolved with our changing society. The first chapter introduces the central theme of the book, how in the past, especially before the turn of the Twentieth Century, waste products served as raw materials for other products. In other words, before we ever invented the word "recycling", practically everything was recycled. Over the past 100 years, this has changed, so that now recycling seems like a new idea. Whereas in the past, cities and households constituted one component of a closed production/consumption system that included manufacturers, following the age of industrialization and mass production, that system has broken apart, and there is now a one-way flow from the factories to the consumers. And this flow leads eventually to mountains of garbage, for which we currently seem to have no better solution than mass burial. Strasser begins her story by describing an archeological dig of a 1620s settlement, where matching pieces of potshards were discovered at great distances from each other, suggesting that if a pot was broken, residents might have been in the habit of reusing the pieces for other purposes. Social history is notoriously hard to reconstruct, since people of the time rarely thought the details of their daily lives important enough to document. This is especially true with the topic of waste, refuse, and garbage. But by carefully picking through such items as housekeeping manuals and business accounting ledgers, Strasser was able to pull many of the pieces of the garbage story together. She found that in the Nineteenth Century, household food scraps were fed to chickens and pigs. Metal and wood items were repaired or refashioned. Before the age of industrial looms, fabric of any kind had much greater value, since all but the very youngest of children were well aware of the tremendous labor involved in weaving cloth. Even after mass-produced fabrics became available, clothing was still stitched, often by hand, at home. For this reason, clothing often symbolized a bond between the producer and the wearer. It was never simply discarded, but rather mended, passed on to others, taken apart and refashioned into new garments, or made into quilts or rugs. As a last resort, it would be used as bandages or sold to the ragman. The phenomenon of the ragman, as Strasser describes him, is particularly fascinating. This was a person who would make the rounds of rural homes with a motley collection of manufactured goods for sale, such as tin dishpans or soap. For payment, he would accept rags, fats, and bones. These items he would ship off to warehouses to be used as raw materials for paper, soap, and fertilizer. As Strasser puts it "The very distribution system that brought manufactured goods to consumers took recyclable materials back to factories." Despite these widespread collection networks, early Nineteenth Century factories suffered continuously from a shortage of raw materials, and labor was also relatively scarce in North America. This led to the development of new industrial processes that relied on mass production techniques, which became dependent on new materials rather than recycled ones. This change, combined with the increasing urbanization of society, began to result in garbage and other unwanted items piling up inside and outside people's houses, soon leading to the need for municipal waste collection services. But no sooner had cities organized a collection system than a new problem cropped up: "Paradoxically, the more trash collection there was, the more trash was generated," as Strasser observes. In just the 4 years between 1903 and 1907, the amount of garbage collected by the city of Pittsburgh, for example, increased by 43%. Cities tried various methods to deal with these huge and growing mounds of garbage, from dumping the stuff in water, to piling it up in poor people's neighborhoods, to incinerating it. Significantly, what all of these methods had in common was that sorting of garbage by composition, such as organic material, metal, and glass, was no longer relevant. Cities which once universally required refuse sorting by households rescinded their laws, and it wasn't until the landfill crises of the 1990s that such laws began to be considered again as part of mandatory recycling programs. This book is filled with many other thought-provoking and interesting topics, such as the history and impact of the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and the patriotic scrap collecting campaigns of the World Wars. Strasser's style is clear and interesting, academic without being stuffy. This is a great resource for anyone interested in material culture, ecology, or American history.
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Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
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Price: $5.98
Updated on 6-21-2008.
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