Emily E. LB. Twarog’s book, Politics of the Pantry, examines women’s consumer activism between the 1930s and the 1970s. In her analysis, Twarog focuses on what she calls “domestic politics,” or housewives’ organizing to protest high food prices and low-quality food on grocery store shelves. Although these protests often focused on bread-and-butter concerns and expressed class consciousness, Twarog argues that domestic politics represented “a distinctive form of activism” and “not simply the feminine version of labor activism” (2). Instead, domestic politics politicized women’s traditional domestic roles in ways that made room for cross-class alliances and brought the home into the center of public policy from the New Deal to the 1970s.
The heroines of Twarog’s story viewed the ability to feed their families high-quality food, with meat at dinner nightly, as a right of citizenship. Americans understood daily meat consumption, she says, not as a luxury but rather as...
