Building a housewife's paradise : gender, politics, and American grocery stores in the twentieth century / Tracey Deutsch.

ISBN:

9780807898345

9781469604121

Title:

Building a housewife's paradise : gender, politics, and American grocery stores in the twentieth century / Tracey Deutsch.

Author:

Deutsch, Tracey.

Personal Author:

Deutsch, Tracey.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Women and the social politics of food procurement -- Small stores, big business: the rise of chain store groceries, 1914-1933 -- The changing politics of mass consumption, 1910-1940 -- Moments of rebellion: the consumer movement and consumer cooperatives, 1930-1950 -- Grocery stores trade up: the politics of supermarkets and the making of a mass market, 1930-1945 -- Winning the home front: gender and grocery stores during World War II -- Babes in consumerland: supermarkets, hardware stores, and the politics of postwar mass retail.

Subject Term:

Supermarkets -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Grocery trade -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Grocery shopping -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Women consumers -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

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Publication Date:

2010

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
381.456413009730904 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.

Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the "shop floor." From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

The emergence of the US supermarket was far from inevitable. Moreover, supermarkets were not designed solely to meet customer demand. Instead, as Deutsch (Minnesota) illustrates in a meticulously researched study that delivers vast quantities of data, the triumph of mass consumption depended on a discourse of "apolitical, passive, female consumers." The authority and power granted to grocers over distribution, profits, and real estate was masked by a seductive message that supermarkets were designed to meet women's desires. Centered on Chicago, this study takes account of how national-scale policies and corporations intersected local dynamics, social relations, and geographies differentiated along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. Linking the production of an ideal consumer and the practices of everyday life to federal policies, urban politics, and a systematic depoliticization of food and consumption, Deutsch argues forcefully that retail history warrants close attention, intimately related to the rise of modern capitalism. Revealing "rifts, gaps, and fissures" in a decades-long project, the author points to periods of resistance on the part of women, suggesting that consumers today might find ways to challenge a system that is too often sold as a done deal. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. A. B. Audant CUNY Kingsborough Community College