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Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity

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Victory gardens, ration books.

While men fought overseas, women fought the war at home, by going to work

and, more subtly, by feeding their families. Mandatory food rationing

during World War II challenged, for the first time, the image of the United

States as a land of plenty and collapsed the boundaries between women's

public and private lives by declaring home production and consumption

to be political activities.

In this fascinating cultural

history, Amy Bentley examines the food-related propaganda surrounding

rationing. She also explores the dual message purveyed by government and

the media that while mandatory rationing was necessary (enabling enough

food to be sent to the U.S. military and Allies overseas), women, black

and white, were also "required" to provide their families with nutritious

food.

Eating for Victory

explores the role of the Wartime Homemaker (media counterpart to the more

familiar Rosie the Riveter) as a pivotal component not only of World War

II but of the development of the United States into a superpower.