We're in for hard times if the Republicans succeed in pushing through this budget. What you may not know is how American women have met hard times before: taking to the streets, boycotting, even going to jail, all in an effort to feed their families.

We have a long history of what some call "panty politics."

For example in the late 1960s, Lynn Heidt became an activist over sour milk. She's one of several housewives who got together and figured out how to read the fresh date codes printed on foods by store managers that were 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. 

To further draw attention to the issue, they went through grocery refrigerators stabbing pencils through expired packs of bologna they deemed unsafe. They loaded up carts of expired foods to deliver to store managers.​​​​​​​

They were far from the first women to raise a ruckus when the powers that be made it tough to take care of their families' basic needs.

U.S. housewives organized food boycotts in every decade from the 1900s through the 1970s. Women who weren't allowed to vote, women who didn't pay attention to politics, women who always did what their husbands wanted, these women stepped out of the private sphere and flexed political power.

We might could learn a thing or two from them.

A Long Tradition of American Women Fighting BS

Headlines from the New York Times, May 17, 1902.

These were not the young working girls of the time going on strike, these were housewives—average age 39—most with four or more children. Far from being spontaneous rioters, they were strategic political actors, drawing on neighborhood networks to pioneer grassroots organizing. 

They used their market savvy to drive down meat prices through a boycott that manipulated supply and demand. They embraced political language, calling themselves strikers, labeling boycott-breakers as scabs, and defending their protests as free speech. Despite tough conditions, they sustained and expanded their movement for weeks.

The boycott spread to the Bronx and Harlem and by June 5, the strike ended with prices lowered to 14 cents per pound.

Not ten years later, women in Cleveland, Ohio, launched a meat boycott protesting high prices that spread across the nation, again involving women in NYC.

​​​​​​​ New York City, East Side women discussing price of meat 

during boycott, 1910. Public domain.

A short generation later, the economic depression of the 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 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.

Then on the afternoon of July 27, 1935, in the Hamtramck, Michigan, shopping district, a troop of 500 housewives descended on Joseph Campau Avenue with banners and picket signs reading: “Strike Against High Meat Prices. Don’t Buy.”

The picket was the first in a summer-long boycott that eventually spread out of the city’s nearly 3 square miles and into neighboring Detroit. It was led by a 32-year-old, 100-pound, first-generation Polish-American named Mary Zuk.
 

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.
 

Unfortunately, the meat boycotts of 1935 did not achieve the twenty-percent price cut the women demanded, but it was clearly a turning point for women's engagement in politics.

Feisty Mary Zuk had left at job the local Dodge factory to raise her two children in the tight-knit Polish community near Detroit before getting elected to lead the boycott. She ended up leading a racially-integrated delegation to Washington, DC to meet with Secretary Wallace, which triggered an investigation into meat prices. Later, she ran for a seat on her local city council and won. 

In the 1940s and 50s housewives again rose up to demand affordable meat prices. 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.

Then came the mostly forgotten "housewives’ revolt" of 1966. It began in Phoenix, where homemakers, fed up with bread prices, boycotted bakeries and baked their own. But the real flashpoint came in Denver. 

That where 52-year-old grandmother Mrs. Paul West (as newspapers identified women then) noticed olive prices had quadrupled in a month. A store official told her to “stick to your cooking.” Wrong move. West quickly organized boycotts of five supermarket chains—about 150 stores in total. The result: prices dropped by up to 20%.

Meanwhile the movement expanded to other cities across the U.S. and Canada.
“Mad Housewives Spread Boycott” read a headline in Lowell, Mass.

In Dallas, women organized what they called a “ladycott” of local supermarkets. In Buffalo, a group called Women on the Warpath boycotted eggs. And the We’ve Had It Club in suburban Atlanta formed a motorcade, taking its protests from store to store.

Then came housewives Lynn Heidt, Jackie Kendall and Bonnie Wilson tagged "Code Breakers" for their work educating shoppers on food expiration dates.

They protested at grocery stores, told their story on national radio and TV and went straight to the top of the National Tea Grocery Chain where Lynn Heidt had purchased the sour milk. The women bought a share in National Tea and went to a shareholders meeting where they shout questions at the company's president.

National Tea responded by hiring a major law firm to investigate, or “spy” on the women and even called the husbands of two of them to ask why “they could not control their wives.”

Thousands of American women who’d never been involved in a protest before—many of whom said they’d had to ask their husbands’ permission to participate in the supermarket boycotts—now had experience on the front lines and pantry politics gave way to the rise of the Women's Movement in the 1970s and increased opportunity for women.

The backlash came immediately and only appeared to let up in succeeding generations. Today the conservative, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, anti-women politicians are back with a vengeance, pushing an agenda that favors billionaires and deepens women's struggle to feed their families and balance their budgets.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

How will we women of today continue the fearless and creative fight for what our children and grandchildren deserve? 

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