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The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women's Lives, 1890-1940. By Beverly Gordon. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 274, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 cloth)
Beverly Gordon's new book is about "the way American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enriched and added meaning to their lives through their 'domestic amusements'-leisure pursuits that took place in and were largely focused on the home" ( 1 ). For anyone familiar with Gordon's writings, it is no surprise that she has provided this clear and concise overview in the book's first sentence, or that the rest of the book maintains this clarity and focus, supported by impeccable scholarship and elegant prose.
Folklorists may well ask if a book that describes the practices of making paper-doll houses, planning elaborate parties, and dressing up and making costumes is useful for our field. My response would be that it depends on how we define our work. If we assume that the white, middle-class (broadly defined) women who participated in these activities do not constitute the kind of "group" that interests us; if we exclude these pursuits because they were promoted through books and magazines, incorporated commercially available materials (such as crepe paper), and functioned as "popular" culture of a past era; or if we look at the ephemeral nature of the resulting "products," then we might conclude that there's nothing...