Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (review)

A most basic practice—food shopping—underwent a dramatic transformation during the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. Food retailing shifted from locally owned grocers and peddlers crowded in urban cores to massive well-lit supermarkets in automobile suburbs by the 1960s. Tracey Deutsch unveils the way that food shopping, as women's work, was a tough job and rife with political implications too. In doing so she has made significant contributions to the histories of business, women, and foodways.

Deutsch tells three stories simultaneously about the grocery trade—the first covers this changing food retailing landscape. The second illuminates how shopping was decidedly political as female shoppers battled with male employees over prices, store layout, and inventory. Her last story demonstrates how women balanced their roles as consumers and citizens, at times frustrated by their lack of power but at other times taking leadership roles and pushing retailers to take heed of their needs. In the end, Deutsch issues a call for readers to remember the political dimensions of shopping and the social dimensions of capitalism, hoping that it will cause us to reinvigorate our dialogue concerning consumption.

The hard work of shopping looms large in this volume and is Deutsch's most important scholarly contribution. Chicago is her case study, and in the first two decades of the century, women literally fought through the city's crowds and haggled daily with store clerks and street peddlers to provision their cupboards. Frequently frustrated by inconsistent prices and products, women battled to make do and demanded much from male employees. From the book's beginning then, Deutsch ably paints a picture of women as political actors in the consumer marketplace. She also writes vivid social history, explaining how women got food in the rapidly growing cities of this era. These stories derive from a rich reading of trade publications, government reports, and the papers of trade associations and corporations.

Women alternated between praise and criticism of food retailers. In the 1920s, the emerging chain store was supposed to remove some of the old tensions between female shoppers and male store employees, making it possible for a female customer to traverse stores without having to "run the gauntlet of [male] clerks looking her over" (54). Women were not always pleased with the chains, however, for without the attention of these clerks, they had to sift through poorly labeled products. To boot, self-service meant lugging bags all the way home through crowded city streets. Many chains responded to intense competition and complaints by moving to outlying neighborhoods in search of more affluent customers. The chains were also challenged by cooperative grocery stores, in which men and women shared management responsibility that was "unmatched in other kinds of firms" (127). Ella Baker and other civil rights activists used the coops as training grounds too, making grocery shopping a thoroughly political process. The co-ops' challenge to chains was limited to the 1930s and 1940s as after the war they became targets of anticommunist agitation.

At the same time that chains and co-ops battled in the 1930s and 1940s, economic depression and war exerted new torques on the economy. In its middle chapters, Building a Housewife's Paradise covers some of the same ground as historians Lizabeth Cohen and Meg Jacobs by investigating the great retailing upheavals in the period. Retailers and consumers faced an onslaught of new National Recovery Administration (NRA) regulations and sales taxes in the 1930s, and Office of Price Administration's (OPA) controls in the 1940s. Deutsch adds new insight to this oft-told story by giving a vivid portrait of the fits and starts for food shoppers as they attempted to first understand and then adhere to complicated regulations imposed by governments. Many women also pushed retailers to carry union goods, cut prices, and stop...