Introduction : consumption as a gendered social practice / Beth Fowkes Tobin -- "The things I so indispensably needed" : material objects as a reflection of Mary Shelley's life / Pamela Siska -- Material women : the department-store fashion poster in Paris, 1880-1900 / Ruth E. Iskin -- Nostalgic appetites : female desire and wartime rationing in Virginia Woolf's Between the acts and Noel Streatfeild's Saplings / Andrea Adolph -- A touch of distinction : furnishing French aristocratic homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Elizabeth C. Macknight -- "Novel and ingenious" : innovative graphic arts in the women's magazines of the 1840s and the construction of middle-class taste / Cynthia Patterson -- The woman's paradise : the American fantasy, home appliances, and consumer demand in liberation France / Rebecca J. Pulju -- Talking points : advertising female telephone identity / Emily Bills -- Trans-coding nationalism : subjectivity and military themes in Regency women's dress / Ellen Kennedy Johnson -- "The beauty of her hands" : the glove and the making of the middle-class body / Ariel Beaujot -- Made for Maharanis : aesthetics of courtly women in colonial princely India / Angma D. Jhala -- Harmony and concealment : how Chinese women fashioned the Qipao in 1930s China / Wessie Ling -- Women, clothing, and politics in Senegal in the 1940s-1950s / Dior Konaté -- The duchess's shells : natural history collecting, gender, and scientific practice / Beth Fowkes Tobin -- Woman of letters : Elizabeth Gaskell's autograph collection and victorian celebrity / Pamela Corpron Parker -- The women of Liulichang : female collectors and bibliophiles in the late Qing / Shana J. Brown -- Japanese objects in impressionist women's art : collecting culture and creating identity / Jennifer T. Criss -- The female past and modernity : displaying women and things in New Zealand department stores, expositions, and museums, 1920s-1960s / Bronwyn Labrum