'Modernity's Disavowal: Women the City and the Department Store

This project started out as an investigation of the position of women in modernity. By focusing on shopping and the emergence of the department store as key iconic aspects of modern urban society my intention was to argue against those theorists who defined modernity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a public stage from which women were excluded. However my attempt to integrate conceptualisations of modernity with questions raised by feminism and the culture of consumption revealed a surprising paucity of theoretical and historical work - a phenomenon which itself required explanation. Increasingly therefore my project was transformed into a genealogy of absence. It became, in addition to an engagement with existing debates and histories, an investigation into the often unconscious motives and priorities that operate in the production of intellectual work and that in this instance have led, I will argue, to the disavowal of a major narrative of twentieth century life.