Enlightenment and the Uses of Woman by

where he was directing the Institute in exile along with Max Horkheimer; Adorno for Oxford, from where he wrote to Fromm suggesting an investi-gation into the ‘feminine character’. He had been led to this proposal, Adorno told Fromm, by some reflections on ‘the glue that binds [capitalist] society together’. Having previously identified ‘the state, religion and family authority ’ as the adhesive agents, he was now convinced that the real cul-prits were women. ‘Women and their specific consumer consciousness must be regarded as the social glue. ’ Would Fromm pursue an investigation into this phenomenon? The tone of the letter is strikingly misogynistic, as Adorno bewails women’s ‘stupid’, ‘irrational ’ immersion in consumer culture and its corrosive effects on modern life. Women’s ‘infantile ’ ‘bedaz-zlement ’ by consumerism, the corruption of their personalities by ‘economic fetishism’, had made them into instruments of capitalist hegemony. ‘Woman today... is... [an] agency of the commodity in society.’1 It is fascinating to revisit Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) i