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Eating for Victory
Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity
Amy Bentley
Paper978-0-252-06727-3
$23.00
| Pub Date: | 1988 |
| Pages: | 272 pages |
| Illustrations: | 20 line drawings |
Victory gardens, ration books. While men fought overseas, women fought the war at home, by going to work and, more subtly, by feeding their families. Mandatory food rationing during World War II challenged, for the first time, the image of the United States as a land of plenty and collapsed the boundaries between women's public and private lives by declaring home production and consumption to be political activities.
In this fascinating cultural history, Amy Bentley examines the food-related propaganda surrounding rationing. She also explores the dual message purveyed by government and the media that while mandatory rationing was necessary (enabling enough food to be sent to the U.S. military and Allies overseas), women, black and white, were also "required" to provide their families with nutritious food.
Eating for Victory explores the role of the Wartime Homemaker (media counterpart to the more familiar Rosie the Riveter) as a pivotal component not only of World War II but of the development of the United States into a superpower.
"We all grew up on tales of World War II featuring the 'wartime homemaker,' the 'victory garden,' 'meat and sugar rationing,' and 'Spam.' But not until reading Amy Bentley's fascinating Eating fr Victory did I understand fully what these symbols meant for culturally and politically and how central they were to wartime battles on the home front, particularly over gender and race."--Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University
"A fascinating, sensible, persuasive, and well-executed investigation of food rationing during World War II."--Mark Leff, author of The Limits of Symbolic Reform
"An elegantly written account of wartime food behavior. . . . Bentley offers up rich, provocative analysis of disparate topics ranging from the politics of rationing and famine relief to the scoiology of canning, gardening, and cooking. An interdisciplinary gem!"--Warren Belasco, author of Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry
Amy Bentley is an assistant professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University.
Subjects:
History, Am.: 20th C. / Women's Studies / Sociology / Black Studies / Food Studies
