“What to Eat in War Time”: Thrift and the Great War

Abstract

During the prewar years of the suffrage campaign, feminist discourses of everyday life were deeply woven into the fabric of the feminist press, as previous chapters have shown. Far from narrowly framed single-issue papers, feminist papers devoted space to covering the intersection of fem-inism and daily life. Fashion and lifestyle columns in Votes for Women, the women's pages of the socialist Daily Herald or the Clarion, and correspondence columns in the socialist feminist paper the Woman Worker or the avant-garde feminist paper the Freewoman all provided feminist writers and editors with unique opportunities for remaking understand-ings of daily life. Feminist print culture studies is often more interested in the years of militant activism that preceded the war than the years that followed the announcement of conflict in August 1914, yet feminist activism and feminist papers continued to circulate, and discourses of everyday life continued to appear in feminist papers during the war years, though in dramatically altered form. In suffrage papers and other venues, feminists adapted prewar discourses of everyday life to make sense of the new meanings of gender and domesticity that pertained to "home front" modern culture. One of the most dramatically altered aspects of everyday life revolved around foodways, especially for those with limited means who suffered through food shortages and long queues. These disruptions were particularly acute in the first weeks and months of the war, when factory closings, inflated food prices, and a lack of government programs made already challenging daily routines for working-class families even more CHAPTER 5