Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Tracey Deutsch

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807859761 ISBN 13: 9780807859766

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2012

Synopsis

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. <BR><BR>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.

About this title

Product Description:

Building a Housewife's Paradise 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 r... Full description

Review:

Putting the state back into the study of consumption, Tracey Deutsch traces the rise of the supermarket as the essential form of food procurement. She highlights the embeddedness of gender within the development of modern retailing, expanding feminist understanding of unpaid labor, women's work, and political activism. You'll never be able to think about shopping in the same way after reading this compelling book!--Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara|""This is a politically charged chronicle of an everyday institution. Deutsch is at the leading edge of one of the most dynamic and innovative fields of historical scholarship today. In her exceptionally sophisticated treatment, daily food shopping becomes an act of public engagement, struggle, even resistance. This is a big story dealing with the very heart of consumer culture.""--Warren Belasco, author of <i>Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food</i>|""Deutsch demonstrates that the history of food retailing in mid-twentieth-century America was deeply political in ways that have been underappreciated. With comprehensive research and effective presentation, <i>Building a Housewife's Paradise</i> makes a significant contribution to gender studies and business history.""--Glenna Matthews, author of <i>Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America</i>|""It seems amazing that no one had yet written about this ubiquitous feature of American physical and economic landscapes. Deutsch's argument about the rise of supermarkets is important because it avoids the sense of inevitability that sometimes surrounds contemporary public debates about corporate concentration and urban sprawl in the era of Wal-Mart. The narrative she presents is not a triumphant one, nor one in which smaller groceries are necessarily victims of corporate power and a 'bigger is better' mentality. Rather, she shows a) the contests over, and even failings of, smaller stores as a driver for supermarkets, rather than a result of them; b) the historical specificity of the time (and places) in which they emerged; and c) the negotiations between historical agents, ranging from the federal government to individual shoppers, who were involved in supermarket planning. This is still a story about power, economic, politics, and of course food procurement, but it is a nuanced and sensitive story, told in a measured way.""--Marina Moskowitz, University of Glasgow<BR>|""Taking women's food procurement seriously as labor, Tracey Deutsch combines fresh research with subtle and sophisticated analysis in this vital contribution to the scholarship on mass consumption. By exposing the policy decisions that structured distribution and the on-the-ground ideological assumptions that informed them, she illuminates the twentieth-century struggle to depoliticize the act of consumption--a crucial counterpart to the battles over production of the same decades. <i>Building a Housewife's Paradise</i> exposes the historical amnesia involved in reading market outcomes as a straightforward expression of consumer demand.""--Bethany Moreton, author of <i>To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise</i><BR>

About this edition

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807859761
• ISBN 13: 9780807859766
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352