Tracey Deutsch - Building a Housewifes Paradise

2010 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Designed by Kimberly Bryant and set in Whitman and Stone Sans by Achorn International, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deutsch, Tracey.
Building a housewifes paradise : gender, politics, and American grocery stores in the twentieth century / Tracey Deutsch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8078-3327-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. SupermarketsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. Grocery tradeSocial aspects United StatesHistory20th century. 3. Grocery shoppingSocial aspectsUnited States History20th century. 4. Women consumersUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title. hf5469.23.u62d48 2010
381'.456413009730904dc22
2009039274

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

TO MY GRANDMOTHERS,

Rose (Burg) Samson & Ruth (Kantor) Deutsch

In the fall of 1932, Chicago was in the throes of the worst economic depression in American history: nearly one of every four employable adults was without a job. Bread lines stretched for blocks on end. City officials warned of the potential for riots. The citys economy, political culture, and basic social structures seemed poised to change dramatically, and no one knew what directions those changes would take.

While many businesses closed their doors for good in the early years of the depression, the National Tea Companyone of Chicagos oldest and largest chain grocery firmstook a different tack: it dramatically remodeled 250 of its stores. Robert Rassmussen, a member of the companys board of directors, described the gleaming new refrigerators, state-of-the-art lighting, and impressive arrays of meats, produce, canned goods, delicatessen items, and staples. The new super-food stores were, he said, a housewifes paradise.

When Rassmussen made this assertion, he was reflecting his own hopeshe did not actually know what women shoppers would have called a paradise. Indeed, the very design and structure of these new stores made it hard to determine what individual women wanted, let alone to offer them the personal attention or services that might have adapted the store to their needs. Yet over the next few decades, Rassmussens claim came to undergird widely accepted ideas about grocery stores, women, and consumer society.

This book asks how and why a certain vision of what women wanted became so important to the National Tea Company, to womens experiences of food shopping, and to mass retail generally. In so doing, it argues for a more complicated view of the emergence of supermarkets than that offered by Rassmussen. The large, standardized supermarkets that dominated the post World War II retail landscape depended on an enormous transformation in the ways in which women sought to feed their families. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women shoppers had been expected to seek out bargainsto haggle with, threaten, praise, cajole, or shame the grocer, as circumstances warranted. Indeed, the workings of food shopping were premised on womens claim to authority in negotiations with retailers. This premise had begun to fade in the decades before World War II, however, and by the postWorld War II period women were expected simply to choose from the grocers offerings and to value low prices and peaceful anonymity above full service and personal attention. By the late 1960s, when this study ends, the woman supermarket shopper had become an emblem of the troubling political disengagement and dissatisfaction fostered by middle-class life.

How did supermarkets, and the top-down, passive model of shopping that they sustained, come to dominate food retailing and consumer societyand ideas about bothin the postwar era? Conventional wisdom holds that supermarkets won shoppers by offering low prices and other features, such as large parking lots, that matched shoppers preferences. In this telling, the needs of consumers for low prices or efficiency guided economic actions.

But this explanation falls short when examined in light of the long history of womens reputation as difficult and demanding customers. Why, for example, did the low prices of supermarkets displace womens expectations of personal attention and serviceif, in fact, they did? How did it ever seem plausible that grocery stores would make shopping a passive experience rather than active work? How and why did business owners decide to operate large, top-down stores in the first place? And how could a single model of food retailing be, at least rhetorically, malleable enough to serve as a symbol of the benefits of consumer society as well as its pitfalls? In other words, how did supermarkets emerge, why did they come to seem so stunningly important, and what does that importance tell us about womens history and the workings of mass retailing and consumption in the United States?

This book answers those questions by embedding stores and retailing in the gender relations, social politics, and political economies that shaped them. Supermarkets and the model of mass retailing that they epitomized emerged not from straightforward consumer demand, but from a more complicated set of causes: federal efforts to administer policy through stores from the late 1930s onward, womens struggles for autonomy in the 1930s and 1940s, consumer activists unwillingness to allow housewives any visible authority, the emergence and embellishment of an ideology of the conservative female shopper in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as retailers long-standing strategies to impose order on their stores and achieve economies of scale.

At the heart of these efforts was control over the shop floor and womens problematic assertion of their individual needs. Federal policy and capitalist impulses toward mass retailing required that retailers and the state be able to impose policy. Neither government programs nor industrial standardization had any hope of working if women continued to expect and to assert control over store operations. The question of womens authority was inseparable from the question of how food would be sold.