Radical Housewives
Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada
by Julie Guard
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Pub Date Feb 12 2019 | Archive Date Feb 25 2019
University of Toronto Press | Studies in Gender and History
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Description
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.
Julie Guard is an associate professor of labour studies at the University of Manitoba.
Advance Praise
“This immaculately researched and wonderfully readable study breathes new life into the fields of labour, women’s, and left history, unsettling many a conventional account and complicating far-too-simple narratives about maternal feminism, consumer activism, and Canadian communism. In all these ways, and many more, Radical Housewives is an extraordinary achievement—an important milestone in the writing about Canada’s postwar history.”
- Ian McKay, L.R. Wilson Chair of Canadian History, McMaster University
“In a period where the emergence of welfare state was almost deduced to New Deal policies, Julie Guard’s carefully studied work shows us the role of grassroots activism that managed to mobilize hundreds of thousands of Canadians to demand for direct government intervention in the economy. This is a very well written, meticulously researched study that not only sheds light on an understudies topic, but it also provides insights on many fronts including women’s movement, labour history, history of the Canadian left, as well as history of progressive ethnic movements, including Jewish and Ukrainian.”
- Mustafa Koc, Department of Sociology, Ryerson University
“Housewives rarely get the attention they deserve. Julie Guard challenges that recurring contempt in this pathbreaking volume. Home-making women have not always been patsies when it comes to radical politics. Far from domestic goddesses, many have been thoughtful and brave observers of the world around them. From the Great Depression to the 1950s, Canada’s Housewives Consumers’ Association channeled popular resistance to capitalism’s poverty-making regime. More than the CCF or the Communist Party, and far, far more than mainstream parties, it rallied Canadians to demand a fair deal after the depredations of depression and war. While it fell victim to character assassination and scare-mongering by Cold Warriors in the RCMP and political and economic elites, it left a history of courage and determination. Julie Guard’s Radical Housewives tells us why this is important.”
- Veronica Strong-Boag, Historian and Historical Consultant, Professor Emerita, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice/Educational Studies, University of British Columbia
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781487521813 |
| PRICE | $28.95 (USD) |
