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

Deutsch, Tracey

3.6

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780807833278: Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807833274 ISBN 13: 9780807833278

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010

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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

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Book Description:

"Putting the state back into the study of consumption, Tracey Deutsch traces the rise of the supermarket as the essential form of food procurement. She highlights the embeddedness of gender within the development of modern retailing, expanding feminist understanding of unpaid labor, women's work, and political activism. You'll never be able to think about shopping in the same way after reading this compelling book!"--Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

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In an 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. She argues that the supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer desire for low prices and convenience, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the "shop floor."

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