April 13, 2018 Hello ,
Sometimes it's awkward at the conference book sales table, when you must chit chat with the
author next to you and feign interest in their new book while they feign interest in your new book..
Emily told me, "U.S. housewives organized food boycotts in every decade from the 1930s through the 1970s."
Really? I didn't know anything about it. Apparently, women all across the country untied their aprons, took to the streets and protested inflated grocery prices, contaminated food and deceptive labeling.
Housewives struggling to feed their families and balance their budgets became militant and angry, demanding a better quality
of life for themselves and their children. They expanded labor union principles to include the home, insisting that like wages and hours, housing and food could be regulated through organizing and boycotts.
They stepped out of the private sphere and flexed political power, the power of their purse strings.
Below: Women in New York protest meat prices in
1945. Food Boycotts Tie Domestic to Political As economic depression worsened in the 1930s, rising food prices compounded women's struggles to raise their children and hold their families together.
In early 1935, Time magazine reported trouble was imminent. "Slowly through the winter, while the meat supply was dwindling, the price to the consumer was creeping up. By February, housewives everywhere began to complain. The costs of vegetables, fruits, and other foods advanced during January and February . The price of meat was predicted to 'soar.'"
In March,
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace tried to pacify housewives by telling them prices of foods other than meat should level off.
But women in Los Angeles started off a string of meat boycotts that would gather steam across the country. By May, the CITY ACTON COMMITTEE AGAINST THE HIGH COST OF LIVING formed to protest rising meat prices. It brought together various groups of women to protest rising meat prices, including Socialist groups, Communist women, black
organizations, church auxiliaries, and mothers’ groups
The women threatened to boycott butcher shops until meat prices dropped by 10 cents a pound, or $1.82 in today's
dollars.
Ann Barton reported in New Masses, For the past two weeks New York housewives have left off their washing and ironing, their scrubbing and cleaning and all their household tasks, to join together in the mass action of a picketline.”
By mid-June, over a thousand butcher
shops in New York had reduced their prices, but the women's demonstrations were just firing up in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Seattle, Miami, and Richmond, Virginia.
By some counts the crowds of mostly women demanding a 20-percent decrease
in meat prices in Hamtramck, Michigan, swelled to 7000 people by the end of July 1935.
Author Emily E. LB. Twarog, says these boycotts and other drives by women to make food safer
and affordable challenge the accepted history of the American "housewife." She told The Atlantic why meat became a powerful and symbolic protest tool for women. "Meat, for citizen
housewives and their family members, became kind of a barometer of people’s standard of living, especially for immigrants. There was an idea of the United States as a land of plenty for immigrants, that they were going to be able to eat meat all the time. Of course, immigrants came here and realized that certainly wasn’t the case. While there may have been ample meat around, they didn’t necessarily have jobs that would allow them to afford that meat.
"At the same time, it was a necessity of many men’s jobs to be able to eat meat, so they had enough energy to work a 12- or 15-hour day in a very physically demanding job. Without meat, they were somehow going to be lesser workers. That reflected poorly on not just the man as a worker, but also on his wife for not being able to supply that food for the family, whether by seeking bargains out on the street with the butcher or managing money smartly. It became a
whole family activity to be able to put meat on the table on a regular basis."
Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Assistant Professor Labor Studies and American History in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
While the meat boycotts of 1935 did not achieve the twenty-percent price cut on meat as the women had demanded, it was clearly a turning point for women's engagement in politics. Feisty Mary Zuk, elected to lead the Hamtramck boycott, had left at job the local Dodge factory to raise her two children in the tight-knit Polish community near Detroit.
She ended up leading a racially-integrated delegation to Washington, DC to meet with Secretary Wallace, which triggered an investigation into meat prices, and she later won a seat on the city council.
Housewives again rose up to demanded affordable meat prices in the forties and fifties. They also organized to demand sanitary storage, packaging and
display of foods, such as loaves of bread, which might be handled by a number of shoppers before being selected for purchase.
In the late 1960s and 70s, housewives Jackie Kendall and Lynn Heidt protested the fresh date codes printed on foods by store managers that would indecipherable to consumers. They printed and gave away 50,000 "codebooks" to mothers and wives to enable them to avoid products past their expiration
date.
They went so far as to go through grocery refrigerators stabbing pencils through expired packs of bologna they deemed unsafe and loading up carts of expired foods to deliver to store managers.
Domestic political power gave way to the rise of the Women's Movement
in the 1970s, as suburban women protested the constraints of being housewives. Since then, Emily E. LB. Twarog concludes, conservative, anti-labor politicians have
co-opted pantry politics pushing an agenda that perpetuates housewives struggle to feed their families and balance their budgets.
Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know. If you know someone who might enjoy
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