Radical housewives : price wars and food politics in mid-twentieth-century Canada / Julie Guard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guard, Julie, 1952- author.

Series:

Studies in gender and history ; 47.

Studies in gender and history ; 47

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Housewives Consumers Association--History--20th century.

Housewives Consumers Association.

Consumer movements--Canada--History--20th century.

Consumer movements.

Housewives--Political activity--Canada--History--20th century.

Housewives.

Women--Political activity--Canada--History--20th century.

Women.

Food--Political aspects--Canada--History--20th century.

Food.

Cost and standard of living--Canada--History--20th century.

Cost and standard of living.

Price regulation--Canada--History--20th century.

Price regulation.

Social justice--Canada--History--20th century.

Social justice.

Housewives--Political activity.

Women--Political activity.

History.

Canada.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

x, 298 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Radical Housewives is a history of the Canada's Housewives Consumers Association. This association was a community-based women's organization with ties to the communist and social democratic left that, from 1937 until the early 1950s, led a broadly based popular movement for state control of prices and made other far-reaching demands on the state. As radical consumer activists, the Housewives engaged in gender-transgressive political activism that challenged the government to protect consumers' interests rather than just those of business while popularizing socialist solutions to the economic crises of the Great Depression and the immediate postwar years. Julia Guard's exhaustive research, including archival research and interviews with twelve former Housewives, recovers a history of women's social justice activism in an era often considered dormant and adds a Canadian dimension to the history of politicized consumerism and of politicized materialism. Radical Housewives reinterprets the view of postwar Canada as economically prosperous and reveals the left's role in the origins of the food security movement"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Price war : housewives organize in the Great Depression

Housewife-patriots and wartime price controls

Fighting for the working class : the struggle for postwar price controls

Mothers, breadwinners, and citizens

Citizen consumers or kitchen communists?

"Reds," housewives, and the Cold War.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

148750215X

9781487502157

1487521812

9781487521813

OCLC:

980730628