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

Readers of this journal probably contemplate many things as they wait to pay at their local food store, but surely many have considered that, in supermarkets, it is often possible to buy one’s groceries without any sort of “social” interaction. Tracey Deutsch’s Building a Housewife’s Paradise traces how such depersonalized retailing came to pass; that is, how large-scale, self-service groceries (supermarkets) beat out a range of other retailing formats by providing consumers low prices, autonomy, and convenience instead of the personal attention that characterized earlier types of food stores. One of the many contributions of Deutsch’s book, a study of food retailing in Chicago over the course of the twentieth century, is to challenge the notion that grocery shopping involves the kind of mind-numbing, passive consumption practiced by the hapless housewives who roamed the pages of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) or the manicured robots who wandered the supermarkets of director Bryan Forbes’s 1975 classic, The Stepford Wives. As Deutsch demonstrates, the history of food retailing shows that grocery shopping often “required work—physical labor as well as social and cultural strategizing, as well as assertions of individual needs against larger marketplace structures” (220). Supermarkets promised to make grocery shopping easier and more pleasurable than ever before, but in the process, undermined consumers’ expectations that food stores were places where they had the right to assert personal preferences and needs—indeed, supermarkets undermined the idea that personal interaction with a grocer was even possible.

Deutsch’s analysis of grocery stores takes a broad view of the politics of consumer society, covering the social politics of gender relations, the grassroots politics of consumer activism, and the state politics that surround such matters as the assessment of sales taxes and the use of food stamps. Another one of the contributions of the book is to demonstrate just how crucial the operators of grocery stores saw mundane issues like the collection of sales taxes as well as how sales taxes and a range of other state policies gave important advantages to the large, hierarchical retailing model embodied by supermarkets. Deutsch insists that consumer demand for low prices and more choices for their dinner tables never served as the determining factor in the rise of supermarkets. The key development, instead, involved the enforcement of increasingly complex governmental policies related to the sales and distribution of food. The enforcement of the New Deal relief programs and wartime rationing and price controls served as the key turning point because they favored large stores that kept prices low and maintained detailed records as well as retailers who were not inhibited by the personal relationships with their customers that made it difficult to resist customers’ demands for special treatment. “Neither government programs nor industrial standardization had any hope of working if women continued to expect and assert control over store operations,” Deutsch explains (3). Here Deutsch flips the many studies that see consumption as a key factor in shaping state policy by arguing that, in the case of supermarkets, it was state policy that shaped consumption practices, even to the point of promoting new types of retailing spaces.

In the post World War II decade, the food retailing landscape became less diverse than at any point in the twentieth century as grocers of all types adopted the basic supermarket formula. The supermarkets of the 1950s not only dominated food retailing in terms of sales volume, but also became symbols for the very strength and bounty of American capitalism, a symbol that Cold Warriors found handy for international trade shows and other types of governmental propaganda. Central to the postwar supermarket-as-cultural-symbol was the myth of the politically complacent female shopper, someone who cared far less about demanding personal consideration in the marketplace than she did about low prices and convenient, glamorous stores...