Politics of the Pantry

Politics of the Pantry
Author: Emily E. LaBarbera-Twarog
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019068559X

'Politics of the Pantry' examines the rise and fall of the American housewife as a political constituency group and explores the relationship between the domestic sphere and the formation of political identity

Politics of the Pantry

Politics of the Pantry
Author: Emily E. LB. Twarog
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190685603

The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry examines how working- and middle-class American housewives used their identity as housewives to protest the high cost of food. In doing so, housewives' relationships with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, Emily E. LB. Twarog looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere. With a focus on food consumption rather than production, Twarog looks closely at the ways food--specifically meat--was used by women as a political tool. Engaging in domestic politics, housewives both challenged and embraced the social and economic order as they sought to craft a unique political voice and build a consumer movement focused on the home. The book examines key moments when women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as housewives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1966 and 1973. Twarog introduces numerous labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas--Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles.

Making the Woman Worker

Making the Woman Worker
Author: Eileen Boris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190874627

This book explains how the 20th century labor standard regime, forged by the International Labor Organization, cast the woman worker as a special type of worker, but a century later, previously excluded home-based workers placed caring labor at the center of debates over the future of work amid new precarity.

The Great Exception

The Great Exception
Author: Jefferson Cowie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 069117573X

How the New Deal was a unique historical moment and what this reveals about U.S. politics, economics, and culture Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception.

Violence of Work

Violence of Work
Author: Jeremy Milloy
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Labor
ISBN: 1487523432

The Violence of Work demonstrates that violence has always been an important part of work under capitalism. The editors explore workplace violence in a diverse range of North American workplaces from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century.

A Shoppers’ Paradise

A Shoppers’ Paradise
Author: Emily Remus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674987276

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown. Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district. After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men. A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight
Author: Kirsten Swinth
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674988906

A spirited defense of feminism, arguing that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. When people discuss feminism, they often lament its failure to deliver on the promise that women can “have it all.” But as Kirsten Swinth argues in this provocative book, it is not feminism that has betrayed women, but a society that balked at making the far-reaching changes for which activists fought. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight resurrects the comprehensive vision of feminism’s second wave at a time when its principles are under renewed attack. Through compelling stories of local and national activism and crucial legislative and judicial battles, Swinth’s history spotlights concerns not commonly associated with the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We see liberals and radicals, white women and women of color, rethinking gender roles and redistributing housework. They brought men into the fold, and together demanded bold policy changes to ensure job protection for pregnant women and federal support for child care. Many of the creative proposals they devised to reshape the workplace and rework government policy—such as guaranteed incomes for mothers and flex time—now seem prescient. Swinth definitively dispels the notion that second-wave feminists pushed women into the workplace without offering solutions to issues they faced at home. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight examines activists’ campaigns for work and family in depth, and helps us see how feminism’s opponents—not feminists themselves—blocked the movement’s aspirations. Her insights offer key lessons for women’s ongoing struggle to achieve equality at home and work.

Mothers of Massive Resistance

Mothers of Massive Resistance
Author: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 019027171X

Mothers of Massive Resistance tells the story of how white women shaped racial segregation in the South and postwar conservatism across the nation. Through their work in social welfare, public education, partisan politics, and culture, they created a massive resistance that spanned five decades, and continues to mobilize local communities and survive legislative defeat.

Migrant Marketplaces

Migrant Marketplaces
Author: Elizabeth Zanoni
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2018-03-21
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0252050320

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Grass Roots

Grass Roots
Author: Emily Dufton
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465096174

How earnest hippies, frightened parents, suffering patients, and other ordinary Americans went to war over marijuana In the last five years, eight states have legalized recreational marijuana. To many, continued progress seems certain. But pot was on a similar trajectory forty years ago, only to encounter a fierce backlash. In Grass Roots, historian Emily Dufton tells the remarkable story of marijuana's crooked path from acceptance to demonization and back again, and of the thousands of grassroots activists who made changing marijuana laws their life's work. During the 1970s, pro-pot campaigners with roots in the counterculture secured the drug's decriminalization in a dozen states. Soon, though, concerned parents began to mobilize; finding a champion in Nancy Reagan, they transformed pot into a national scourge and helped to pave the way for an aggressive war on drugs. Chastened marijuana advocates retooled their message, promoting pot as a medical necessity and eventually declaring legalization a matter of racial justice. For the moment, these activists are succeeding -- but marijuana's history suggests how swiftly another counterrevolution could unfold.