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

The supermarket emerged as a dominant symbol of post-World War II abundance and prosperity in American consumer society. The dominance of the supermarket has usually been explained as a result of business innovation and consumer demand. Tracey Deutsch persuasively complicates this interpretation, showing that the supermarket must be understood as the product of government policy and the actions of women as much as it was the invention of experimental entrepreneurs. Deutsch argues that “the supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from a straightforward attempt to satisfy consumer demand but through retailers’ sometimes contradictory efforts to administer government regulations, achieve financial success, and control the shop floor and also through women customers’ negotiation of budgets, familial needs, ethnic loyalties, political desires, and ideologies of domesticity” (6). In contrast to twentieth-century consumer histories often told from a national perspective, Deutsch takes a case study approach focused on neighborhood groceries and chain stores in Chicago from about 1910 through the 1960s. This allows her to consider not only the history of larger firms but also the local conditions and variety of consumer choices in Chicago for procuring food including small family stores, large national chains, and consumer cooperatives. Told from a national perspective, the rise of the supermarket appears to be a relatively clear cut narrative of standardization and centralization. Experienced from the local perspective, the failures and successes of standardization become clearer as firms sought to impose new retailing strategies in everyday life. This case study approach makes it possible to consider a wide range of sources including manuscript materials documenting consumer organization activities, federal census records, local government records for Chicago, oral histories, popular consumer magazines, and corporate records.

It is not possible to understand the history of the supermarket without considering gender. According to Deutsch, “the question of women’s authority was inseparable from the question of how food would be sold” (3). Deutsch explores the rise of consumer activism in the economic crises of the Great Depression and food rationing during World War II. The growth of an organized consumer movement highlighted concerns about the authority of women consumers. The 1930s and 1940s in particular marked a critical period of reinventing supermarkets based on a conservative model of middle class femininity in spite of the fact that the prevailing rhetoric asserted women’s preference for the new supermarket environment of clean, well-lit, orderly stores. “Large, centrally managed chain store firms and the supermarkets that they operated proved best able to enforce rationing and price controls because their structure effectively prevented women customers from demanding personal exceptions to store policy” (8). Thus Deutsch forges important connections between consumer history and politics broadly defined to include government policy and social relations in the local community. Her carefully crafted interpretation documents the role of government policy—especially sales tax, relief policies during the depression, and rationing during WWII—for creating conditions that privileged chain stores and supermarkets over the small mom and pop retailer.

Deutsch convincingly shows how the creation of the supermarket was a highly contingent, negotiated, social and political process; not inevitable and not easily explained as a result of consumer demand or consumer satisfaction. Written in an engaging style accessible to students, Building a Housewife’s Paradise makes essential contributions to consumer history, business history, and women’s history.