The market imperfections of business, shoppers and consumerism: Esther Peterson and the legacies of the National Consumers’ League

Esther Peterson’s long career in the consumer movement, White House and private sector, discloses much about organized consumerism, its politics and popular reception in the U.S.A. in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies. It also demonstrates the abiding influence of the National Consumers’ League (N.C.L.), founded in 1899, on her understanding of markets, business, shoppers and strategies for reform. This article traces the relationship between Peterson’s thought and practice and that of the N.C.L. The idea that markets could be made to work more fairly if consumers had the knowledge to balance commercial power and the will to act was widespread in the twentieth-century consumer movement. Shopper agency could then be about more than self-interest and could bring ethical reform to the wider society. The article also identifies consumer activist’s recurring unease about shoppers’ aptitude for this role - their limited receptiveness to consumer movement initiatives and how they as well as business frustrated fair markets - and argues that this exposes a contradiction in the consumer movement’s own market-based approach and model of reform.