ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three historical timelines that recap the many milestones in meaning, gender, and resistance. It then discusses how consumption threads can be analyzed through their cultural continuities and change. The chapter next suggests additional cultural threads worthy of fuller scrutiny and draws a few implications of this history for CCT research. The history of gender and consumption in America can similarly be interpreted as having threads of continuity as well as instances of change. One long strand has pointed toward greater gender equality in family decision-making, while another led to increasing female dominance in the management of household consumption. Male dominated in the colonial and early national eras, domestic purchasing and consumption became increasingly feminized in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. Anti-consumption thought and outright resistance have shown broad continuities in motives (religious, philosophical, political) and in behavioral expressions (targeted boycotts, voluntary simplicity, defiance of prohibitions).
