Delicious Adventures and Multicolored Pantsuits: Gender and Cosmopolitan Selfhood in the Selling of Hawai'i

After Hawai‘i statehood in 1959, business leaders and policymakers sought to sell the new state as a racial paradise to mainland Americans. For those who could not travel to paradise American consumer culture in the post-statehood era offered a host of Hawaiian-themed commodities. Marketers targeted women in particular, enticing them to buy into Hawai‘i with promises cosmopolitan sophistication and sexual liberation. 

This paper asks why American women were so fascinated with all things Hawaiian in the two decades after statehood, and why the Hawaiian export market linked racial and ethnic boundary-crossing with women’s self-fulfillment. According to their partisans—women’s magazines, fashion manufacturers, fruit growers, cookbook authors—Hawaiian products exported to the mainland, from canned pineapple to island fashion, could induce personal transformation in their predominantly white, female consumers. Cookbooks and guides for hosting backyard luaus suggested that the acts of making and eating Hawaiian food, with its blending of ethnic cuisines, could tap feelings of empathy and tolerance, catalyzing a new, more relaxed, racially enlightened worldview. The Hawaiian apparel industry, meanwhile, described American women’s embrace of island clothing as a rejection of the conformity and confinement associated with 1950s fashion. The appeal of Hawaiian garments, which by 1966 was the state’s third largest export, was attributed to their emphasis on color and comfort—reflecting the ethnic diversity and social laxity that were said to characterize Hawaiian society, qualities that mainland women were supposedly embracing themselves. 

What such utopian ideas obscured, however, was how the broader construction of Hawai‘i as a multiracial paradise served larger economic and geopolitical projects. By situating mainland women’s consumption of Hawai‘i in global context, this paper explores the ways in which mainland women were participating in U.S. expansion in the Pacific, for which Hawai‘i was a staging ground.