ABSTRACT
Shopping as a 'sport' existed well before the rise of the department store; the concentration of so much of consumer culture in one institution, however, made the problems of consumption, including middle-class shoplifting, more visible. By the 1880s, the growing phenomenon of department stores was replacing the older era of smaller drapery and haberdashery shops. As the new centers of middle-class shopping, department stores became the sites of middle-class consumer crime. The sexual undercurrent of middle-class women and shoplifting which is evident in the late 1830s and 1840s' and some later discussions of middle-class shoplifting comes to the surface in later theories of kleptomania. Despite the attempts of the medical community to keep the theory of the kleptomania diagnosis separate from popular culture, the court system, and biases of gender and class, these factors remained an integral part of the diagnosis.
