Do it yourself. A different history of the consumer age

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Reinhild Kreis
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450068392

Most citizens of modern consumer societies are prosumers, presumably without thinking about it. They buy baking ingredients, electric drills, or hair color, and turn them into cakes, furniture, and hairstyles. By combining purchased items with their own labor, they are both consumers and producers. This invisible economy in the grey area between production and consumption rose together with modern consumer society when people increasingly had the opportunity to chose between purchasing ready-made items on the market, household production, and the many options in between. Despite its enormous impact the interaction between production and consumption in private households has received little scholarly attention.“Make or buy”-decisions and the many options in between never were (just) a private matter. Decisions about modes of provision transport ideas about identities and about the employment of resources such as time, money, and materials. How households provisioned themselves was therefore always of interest for politicians, industry, and scholars. My book investigates the period from the 1880s to the 1980s. It analyzes (1) attempts to intervene in modes of provision of private households such as the introduction of manual training and home economics in school curricula, the ideal of the “good housewife”, bans on home slaughtering during the World Wars, government-driven programs to increase home improvement activities in the GDR, and not least the economic interests of branches such as the home improvement or food industries. On a more practical level, the book (2) looks into practices of making things oneself: What did households produce at home, how, and for which reasons? How were tasks divided along the lines of gender, class, and generation? How important were thriftiness, fun, and quality awareness? What was considered work or leisure?In my book, I call into question the powerful dichotomies of production and consumption, work and leisure which systematically ignore all activities that do not fit into these coordinates. As the first scholarly and historical analysis of the discourses and practices around household production, the book reveals the development of a highly dynamic and graded repertoire of practices and products which created a multitude of options between make and buy. By explaining how such discourses and practices shaped social and economic order, the book offers a new interpretation of high modernity.Practices of making things oneself, the book argues, served as important regulative in modern societies, as they helped balancing out production and consumption, work and leisure with regard to gender, class, and generation. I show household production as a huge market and as a moral economy in which questions of provision were closely intertwined with ideas about right or wrong actions, identities, and role models, in short: to which degree social and economic orders were shaped by decisions about “make or buy?”

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants