UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation shows how liberal U.S. women mobilized their economic identities and practices as 'consumers' to build movements for international peace from 1919 to 1946. As a multi-racial, comparative history, it demonstrates how white, Black, and Asian American women invested their marketplace interactions with distinct meanings. Previous studies have uncovered lively post-World War I debates around the ideal scope and power of international institutions, illustrated how suffrage reshaped women's political participation in the U.S. and abroad after 1920, and cast the consumer as an increasingly central figure within liberal economic theory during the interwar years. My dissertation is the first work to closely examine the interplay between these historical processes. It is organized around three central questions. How can U.S. women's identities and practices as 'consumers' give us insight into the ways they understood themselves as actors on a world stage during the turbulent interwar period and World War II? What underlying assumptions about international political economy, global geography, or U.S. foreign policy motivated their campaigns? What were they trying to achieve, and did their actions reach those stated goals?

This work makes three core arguments. First, and most centrally, it claims that these U.S. women used consumer campaigns to enact a sense of themselves as members of a broad, international polity, or as they sometimes termed themselves, "citizens of the world." Exerting a voice on a global scale was not a straightforward practice, however. It would demand innovative ways of thinking about and participating in politics. Consumer activism offered one such avenue. In the early twentieth century, U.S. women's networks organized their purchasing power to push for local and national political change. They turned to this tool especially when they lacked access to formal political power. Women's understandings of themselves as 'global' consumers encouraged them to extend this practice onto an international stage. They practiced 'consumer diplomacy' when they used their organized buying power to enact or uphold boycotts, promote food aid efforts, or even build international institutions that they believed could keep the peace.

The second major finding of this dissertation is that consumer diplomats had a hand in building powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They especially engaged in this activity when they believed that institutions designed to maintain international peace, like the League of Nations, faltered. The International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) emerges as the most critical example of such an NGO. The ICA promoted the development of cooperative economic structures, including farms, wholesalers, and retailers, all of which were owned and operated by their members. Proponents believed that these small-scale economic democracies could scale up into a commercial system could distribute commodities more equally and limit the competitions over resources that they feared could lead to conflict. In this way, cooperation offers an example of what I term a 'political economy of peace'. The basic unit of this business infrastructure was the local shop, which relied on members' purchases and offered a site around which consumer diplomats could organize.

Third, I claim that peace negotiations during and immediately after World War II offered consumer diplomats the clearest opportunity to voice the ideas about peace and human need that they had generated throughout the interwar years. Consumer diplomats claimed that the United Nations had to take consumer needs seriously if it was to be a powerful peacekeeping body. In doing so, they buttressed emerging postwar institutions like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), built new NGOs like the non-profit Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE), and even offered roads not taken in postwar planning. Though they did not always achieve their intended results, consumer diplomats participated in crucial conversations about the rights and obligations of purchasers in a globalizing marketplace.