The rhetorical subversion of cultural boundaries: The national consumers’ league

Abstract

Previous research illustrates that a movement may express a moral challenge to the dominant social order, while paradoxically reinforcing the very ideology which maintains the movement's disenfranchised status. This study argues that to foster meaningful and lasting changes in the dominant social order, a non‐establishment group must overcome the boundaries of acceptable social conduct constraining its members. The National Consumers’ League reveals how movements may subvert such cultural boundaries through multiple layers of rhetorical construction. In an era when women held little access to institutionalized instruments of political authority, the League fashioned its own mechanism of influence by reformulating the status of consumers as social agents.