Rollwagen, Katharine
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Item "The market that just grew up": How Eaton's fashioned the teenaged consumer in mid-twentieth-century Canada(University of Ottawa, 2012) Rollwagen, Katharine; Gaffield, ChadThis thesis focuses on the emergence of the teenaged consumer as a market segment in Canada during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It challenges the notion that teenagers were of little interest to retailers until economics and demographics shaped the more numerous and prosperous post-war teenagers of the Baby Boom generation. Using evidence from corporate records and analysis of mail order catalogues, the study examines how department store retailer, the T. Eaton Company, Limited, began to cultivate a distinct and lucrative teenaged consumer in the 1930s, and thereby began shaping the teenaged consumer. The thesis contextualizes the case study of Eaton’s by exploring the varied expectations that adults had of young people at the time, using census records and magazines (Chatelaine, Canadian Home Journal and Mayfair) to explore concerns about young people’s transition to adulthood. It then focuses on how Eaton’s made a concerted and sustained effort to attract teenager customers to its catalogue and stores. Analysis of its semi-annual catalogue highlights the emergence of specialized clothing size ranges and styles, revealing that Eaton’s increasingly viewed the teenaged years as an important in-between life stage. Eaton’s also instituted teenage advisory councils to both glean market trends and provide a venue for what it considered education for novice consumers. Eaton’s presented consumption as a way to prepare young people for adult roles, legitimizing teenaged participation in the consumer marketplace and contributing to wider debates about when and how teenaged Canadians should reach maturity. Taken together, the chapters of this thesis reconsider the origins of the teenager's prominent position as a sought-after consumer market. The result contributes to a better understanding of the influence of the retail industry on cultural understandings of childhood and growing up in twentieth century Canada.Item Bunkhouse and home: Company, community, and crisis in Britannia Beach, British Columbia(University of Victoria, 2005) Rollwagen, Katharine; Baskerville, Peter; MacPherson, IanCanada's company towns have traditionally been seen as temporary settlements: remote, unstable places shaped by authoritarian employers. Despite these stereotypes, daily life in single industry communities was quite complex, shaped by residents, employees, and company officials alike. This thesis revisits one twentieth-century company town to examine the varied functions and meanings of community in a one industry setting. In the copper-mining town of Britannia Beach, British Columbia, community was both a cultural construct and a social process. While the Britannia Mining & Smelting Company, Limited used the idea of community to inspire cohesion and loyalty in its largely transient workforce, employees and residents were rarely united. Instead, they used notions of marital status, respectability, gender, class, and ethnicity to establish and contest community boundaries. Furthermore, when the company ceased operations for two periods in 1958 and 1 964, notions of community both shaped and limited residents' responses to the shutdowns.Item [Abstract] "That touch of paternalism": Cultivating community in the company town of Britannia Beach, 1920-1958.(University of British Columbia, 2006) Rollwagen, KatharineAbstract of an article written by Katharine Rollwagen, "'That touch of paternalism': Cultivating community in the company town of Britannia Beach, 1920-1958" which appeared in the journal BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.Item [Abstract] Eaton's goes to school: Youth councils and the commodification of the teenaged consumer at Canada's largest department store, 1940-1960.(Les Publications Histoire sociale/Social History, Inc., 2014-11) Rollwagen, KatharineAbstract of an article written by Katharine Rollwagen, "Eaton's goes to school: Youth councils and the commodification of the teenaged consumer at Canada's largest department store, 1940-1960" which appeared in the journal Histoire sociale/Social History.Item [Post-print] When ghosts hovered: Community and crisis in the company town of Britannia Beach, British Columbia, Canada, 1957-1965(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Rollwagen, KatharineBritannia Beach is not a ghost town today, but between 1957 and 1965 residents and employees of the former company-owned copper mining town, located 48 km north of Vancouver, British Columbia, had good reasons to believe it would become one. The town faced two major crises in less than a decade, triggering mine shutdowns that threw the future of the town into question. How did two shutdowns within a decade and affecting the same company town prompt such different reactions? This article explores the extent to which employees’ notions of community were, in historian Steven High’s words, a “sufficiently empowering myth,” capable of mobilizing Britannia’s workforce to resist the mine closures when ghosts hovered over the town.