Making the Home Front: Gender, Taste, and Food in the Late New Deal Period

This paper will explore the origins of the WWII feminine home-front by highlighting the gendered rhetoric of the late New Deal state in relation to food, taste, and cooking. The argument builds on an in-depth analysis of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) America Eats archive, highlighting how this project of cultural nation-building became a cathartic site for FWP workers of all states of life to voice their concerns over the industrialization of the American food system in the interwar period. The America Eats project was, in part, a reaction against home economics and its collusion with the food industries, asking for the return of 'good eating' instead of what they perceived as an alienating nutritional discourse. FWP workers linked the nation’s culinary and sensory deterioration to the increasing role of the food industries in determining American diet, but they also held women responsible for indulging in these new foods and serving them to their families. The implied meaning of their nostalgic and conservative narrative was that the feminine surrender to standardized food had corrupted their family’s diet and taste and thus weakened the nation’s force. Rejecting home economics and industrial food was a deeply gendered and conservative move and implied that women would still cook, and work, for their family. Women were then alternatively described as compliant victim of the food industries marketing scheme and as “kitchen magicians.” Blame and celebration neared each others. This paradox remained at the heart of American food culture in twentieth century America. The debate about how women fed their family in the late Depression and in the early 1940s is central to understating the gendered politics of the home-front during WWII described by Amy Bentley in Eating For Victory [Bentley 1998] and the “domestic containment” of women in the early cold war [May 1988].