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Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, by Susan Strasser
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An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life-throwing things out-and how it has transformed American society.
Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture-the trash it produces-and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.
Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change-the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale.
Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on who's counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep.
- Sales Rank: #186581 in Books
- Color: White
- Published on: 2000-09-01
- Released on: 2000-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .82" w x 6.00" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
From Publishers Weekly
"Nothing is inherently trash," claims Strasser (Satisfaction Guaranteed) in this vibrant social history of American attitudes toward superfluous or unusable material items. Before the 20th centuryAwhen mass production, post-WWII consumer culture and planned obsolescence created a society in which disposability was the normAbroken crockery, food, buttons, bones, fat, rags, tin, paper and other refuse were precious commodities, especially in areas of urban or rural poverty. Drawing on the work of such anthropologists as Mary Douglas, Thorsten Veblen and Claude L?vi-Strauss, of social critics like Jacob Riis and of such authors as Lydia Maria Child (whose popular The American Frugal Housewife was published in 1829), Strasser demonstrates how the designation "trash" exposes underlying attitudes about class, race, ethnicity, patriotism, survival, religion and art. Perceptively noting the intersections between capitalism, consumerism, industrialization and class mobility, the book spills over with fascinating factsAfor instance, in 1830, 10,000 hogs roamed Manhattan's streets eating garbage and providing food for the poor. It also offers revealing analyses of why many Jewish immigrants went into the rag business; how "trash" is gendered and how sanitary napkins became emblematic of the new disposable consumer culture. The chapters on the ultra-patriotic scrap drives of WWI and IIAparticularly Strasser's observations on how the U.S. government encouraged spying on those who "hoarded" scrap metalAare illuminating and prove her point that "trash" is always more than it appears. Agent, Mary Evans. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The author of books on housework and the American mass market, social historian Strasser explores what America has discarded, from the period when Colonists valued everything up to today's era of public landfills. She chronicles how mass production, technological change, ideals of cleanliness, and style have altered America's attitudes toward stewardship and throwing things out. Since paper production in the early days required the addition of scarce rags and scraps, people used paper sparingly. But while Henry Ford's Model T was meant to last, competitor General Motors's yearly model changes heralded a consumer culture that venerated the new. Strasser's well-sourced text, replete with attributions from women's magazines, indicates that genre's evolution from frugal housekeeper's counselor to consumer culture adjunct. Beginning as a countercultural environmental movement in the late 1960s, recycling had begun to enter the mainstream by the 1980s. The book ends on the promising note that "profligacy may one day be understood as a stage of development." Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries.AElaine Machleder, Bronx, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
By their trash shall you know them'' is the theme of this research-driven exploration of the rubbish and refuse habits of more than two centuries of Americans. ``Rubbish took on new meanings'' in the vast transition between the preindustrial society of the 18th century and the consumer culture of the 20th, says Strasser (Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, 1989). She not only sorts what was trash in the 19th century, but tracks how and why what is defined as garbage expanded from a few shards of broken crockery buried in the backyard to landfills full of computers and disposable diapers. Described in detail are thrifty habits of 19th-century families, who refashioned worn or used objects of every description from broken bottles (could be made into funnels and bowls) to tired party dresses. If objects like rags and bones couldn't be reused in the home, they were sold to itinerant peddlers to be recycled into paper and buttons. Children scavenged back alleys to find castoffs, especially scrap metal, that could be sold for a few pennies. At the turn of the century, increasing class differences, the growth of manufacturing, new concern with sanitation, and the entrance of women into the marketplace with no time to refurbish worn clothing brought upheaval to trash culture. Further changes are tracked through WWI, the Depression, and WWII, when recycling fat, metal, rubber, and paper became a patriotic duty. A wave of consumerism followed WWII, and the current wave of recycling is an offshoot of the countercultural 1960s, says Strasser. Although concerned about the continuing large volume of refuse generated now, Strasser is heartened that sorting trash for disposal has been revived, this time as a moral act and not a pecuniary one. Rummaging through the trash barrel of history has unearthed some choice, if occasionally dry, morsels of 20th-century culture. (b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Thought-provoking
By Amazon Customer
This book is a history of household waste in the United States and what we have done with it over the years. Although Strasser takes her research as far back as colonial times, most of the focus is on the habits of the Nineteenth Century, and how they evolved with our changing society. The first chapter introduces the central theme of the book, how in the past, especially before the turn of the Twentieth Century, waste products served as raw materials for other products. In other words, before we ever invented the word "recycling", practically everything was recycled. Over the past 100 years, this has changed, so that now recycling seems like a new idea. Whereas in the past, cities and households constituted one component of a closed production/consumption system that included manufacturers, following the age of industrialization and mass production, that system has broken apart, and there is now a one-way flow from the factories to the consumers. And this flow leads eventually to mountains of garbage, for which we currently seem to have no better solution than mass burial.
Strasser begins her story by describing an archeological dig of a 1620s settlement, where matching pieces of potshards were discovered at great distances from each other, suggesting that if a pot was broken, residents might have been in the habit of reusing the pieces for other purposes. Social history is notoriously hard to reconstruct, since people of the time rarely thought the details of their daily lives important enough to document. This is especially true with the topic of waste, refuse, and garbage. But by carefully picking through such items as housekeeping manuals and business accounting ledgers, Strasser was able to pull many of the pieces of the garbage story together. She found that in the Nineteenth Century, household food scraps were fed to chickens and pigs. Metal and wood items were repaired or refashioned. Before the age of industrial looms, fabric of any kind had much greater value, since all but the very youngest of children were well aware of the tremendous labor involved in weaving cloth. Even after mass-produced fabrics became available, clothing was still stitched, often by hand, at home. For this reason, clothing often symbolized a bond between the producer and the wearer. It was never simply discarded, but rather mended, passed on to others, taken apart and refashioned into new garments, or made into quilts or rugs. As a last resort, it would be used as bandages or sold to the ragman.
The phenomenon of the ragman, as Strasser describes him, is particularly fascinating. This was a person who would make the rounds of rural homes with a motley collection of manufactured goods for sale, such as tin dishpans or soap. For payment, he would accept rags, fats, and bones. These items he would ship off to warehouses to be used as raw materials for paper, soap, and fertilizer. As Strasser puts it "The very distribution system that brought manufactured goods to consumers took recyclable materials back to factories."
Despite these widespread collection networks, early Nineteenth Century factories suffered continuously from a shortage of raw materials, and labor was also relatively scarce in North America. This led to the development of new industrial processes that relied on mass production techniques, which became dependent on new materials rather than recycled ones. This change, combined with the increasing urbanization of society, began to result in garbage and other unwanted items piling up inside and outside people's houses, soon leading to the need for municipal waste collection services. But no sooner had cities organized a collection system than a new problem cropped up: "Paradoxically, the more trash collection there was, the more trash was generated," as Strasser observes. In just the 4 years between 1903 and 1907, the amount of garbage collected by the city of Pittsburgh, for example, increased by 43%. Cities tried various methods to deal with these huge and growing mounds of garbage, from dumping the stuff in water, to piling it up in poor people's neighborhoods, to incinerating it. Significantly, what all of these methods had in common was that sorting of garbage by composition, such as organic material, metal, and glass, was no longer relevant. Cities which once universally required refuse sorting by households rescinded their laws, and it wasn't until the landfill crises of the 1990s that such laws began to be considered again as part of mandatory recycling programs.
This book is filled with many other thought-provoking and interesting topics, such as the history and impact of the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and the patriotic scrap collecting campaigns of the World Wars. Strasser's style is clear and interesting, academic without being stuffy. This is a great resource for anyone interested in material culture, ecology, or American history.
32 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
A Treasure based on Trash
By Renee Daphne Kimball
Exceptionally fine read! Discusses with fascinating clarity what, on the surface, would appear to be a repellant subject. American History has a whole new meaning. This book answers the unspoken questions of "what DID they do with...." in an orderly, systematic yet very interesting way. Who would have known garbage could be so riveting?
Well written, without technical jargon and extremely well organized. Strausser has turned a sow's ear into a silk purse. Excellent discussion of the why and how of our detritus disposal through the ages right up through the Hippie revival of the 70's and the Recycling Exchange on the internet today.
I can highly recommend this book to anyone with even a slight interest in the cycle and re-cycle of our castoffs. The integral involvement of the homemaker in early days was a genuine eye-opener and a sparkling promise of future possibilities for us all.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Quite interesting
By Debbie
I read this book for research because I wanted to know what people used to do with trash (or what we now call trash). If you're interested in the answer, this is a good book to read. It discusses in detail what people used to do in the 1800's (and before) with old clothing, food scraps, cooking fats, worn or broken items, etc., and how and why that changed over time up until the present.
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