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

by Tracey Deutsch

Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores. &9;Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the "shop floor." From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, po

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction, Womens

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dominant narrative detailing the rise of that most poignant icon of postwar America—the supermarket—tells a tale in which one-stop shops emerged from a combination of entrepreneurial innovation and (female) consumer demand for convenience, low-prices, abundant choices, and settings that offered glamorous, pleasurable, and luxurious experiences. In her nationally instructive case study of Chicago from the 1910s to the 1960s, Tracey Deutsch, associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, provides a more complex account.

Deutsch complicates the supermarket story, arguing that governmental policies, rather than consumer demand or desire, played a leading role in shaping how and what food filled grocery baskets, as well as transforming the relationship and power dynamics between grocers and consumers. For example, anti-chain campaigns, cooperatives, and consumer activism all resisted supermarkets, but the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II each cemented the prowess of the centralized chain store. Embracing the principles of standardization, centralization, economies of scale, and lower labor costs, these retail sites emerged victorious due to their ability to carry out state and federal policy, such as dispensing federal food relief, charging sales taxes, and enacting wartime rationing and price controls.

Beyond her focus upon business and retail history, Deutsch places gender at the center of her study, arguing that women and their shopping labors lost significant authority and autonomy during the transition in which food retailing became centralized in supermarkets. No longer empowered to negotiate quality and price, need and desire within the food retail space, women and their shopping came to be viewed not as labor at all, but as passive consumption, a mindless pursuit embodied by the likes of The Stepford Wives. Although the supermarket was invoked during the Cold War, as a vibrant symbol of American cultural values—freedom, choice, and abundance— Deutsch proves that this was not necessarily the case, as the supermarket falls a good deal short of a housewife’s paradise.

Indeed, while supermarkets were supposedly developed to give women what they wanted, the politics of mass retail did not adequately assess women’s desires and thus failed to fulfill them. Furthermore, Deutsch argues that the norms of supermarket shopping (buying in bulk, traveling by car to and from stores, navigating large shop floors, and paying the listed price without “resistance or negotiation”) not only sought to control and limit female consumers, but also excluded shoppers unable to conform to said norms, such as poor Americans. In this way, Deutsch’s concluding paragraphs on the current dichotomy between food deserts and the local food movement reveal how food retail configures the social aspects, politics, and economics of American life.

[Kerstin Tuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tracey Deutsch’s 2010 Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century expertly interrogates the intersections of gender ideology, political economy, and the practice of acquiring groceries. Focusing primarily on Chicago, Illinois from the 1910s through the 1960s, Deutsch constructs a compelling argument that the figure of the housewife, the stereotypical American grocery shopper, went from an aggressive, hardworking, even sometimes angry haggler in the early twentieth century to an easily-dazzled, passive, and blissfully satisfied sort of Stepford Wife by the 1960s and 70s. Deutsch’s feminist approach complicates an overly-simplified purely economic explanation of the shift from small store to mass retail.

Of course, this transformation of the housewife/shopper did not simply materialize out of thin air: Deutsch constructs her argument by cataloguing the typical shopping habits of housewives alongside the retail and distribution changes occurring as grocers transitioned from small, independent vendors to massive, highly-uniform and corporate-regulated chain supermarkets. While one may expect that the structural changes of grocery retail were a direct parallel to the desires of those doing the shopping, Deutsch illustrates that this exchange was much more complicated. Grocer profits, political and economic events such as the Great Depression, New Deal, and Cold War, as well as gender ideology significantly ordered the location, service style, décor, and products carried in grocery stores. Using such sources as tax laws, women’s clubs discourses, advertisements, grocery industry manuals and guidelines, as well as personal accounts of shopping that women recorded in letters and interviews, this book mediates abstract gender ideology with material concerns over the ever-necessary process of purchasing food. For the most part, the text is organized chronologically, with chapters structured on different “eras” of the evolution of grocery stores and food procurement.

In my view, Deutsch’s feminist analysis deployed in this text is the most critical contribution of the text because it complicates the binary of market/non-market, economic/non-economic relationships. Not only were grocery stores and other places of food purchasing, such as a consumer co-op or street peddler’s stall, sites of economic exchange, they were also sites of gender reification. As economic politics began to put more weight on the role of the consumer in maintaining the economy, particularly in times of insecurity or turbulence, the conflation of consumer power and, therefore, political power and responsibility onto the housewife generated discomfort for the (vast majority) men who owned, planned, and operated grocery stores. The book’s conclusions are particularly powerful in carrying these power relations vested in the consumer (and economic subject) and the housewife (a stereotypically non-economic, or perhaps non-market subject) into a critique of neoliberalism in the contemporary United States. While I found the majority of Deutsch’s discussions and sources accessible and convincing, I would have personally enjoyed a more in-depth examination of the role of advertising in depicting, constructing, and negotiating gender and consumption. Additionally, I wonder if more explicit discussion of the developments of feminist theories and thinking during the time period studied in this book (especially in relation to notions of household labor) could further enrich the feminist analysis Deutsch employs.

[Ruthie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐️ I really enjoyed the last 25% a lot more than the rest. So fascinating and interesting to read, esp the post war period. It’s also just so wild how society has shifted so far away from the basic fulfillments and simplicities we were built on