Women's History

Text and illustrations provide the history of print advertising since 1789. Also covers major corporations and their products.

Provides information on fabrics, materials, and manufacturing; a discussion of daily life and dress; and the types of clothes worn by men, women and children of all levels of society.

"Known as the Dean of American Cooking, James Beard set a standard of culinary excellence that's still a benchmark today. He was an early television presence who helped shape what America ate in restaurants and cooked at home, and was both an innovative recipe writer and a scholar of American foodways, preserving classic dishes from the past for his readers to cook in the present.

Fads, in contrast to trends, are shorter-lived, potentially not as widespread across demographics of age and income, and may be viewed as oddities or outliers once their period of popularity has passed. Though most fads had short spans of popularity, fashion fads are culturally significant. They are emblematic of attitudes and ideas that existed in an historical period. Fads have the special ability to reveal feelings, dispositions, and values that might not be well understood through other historical source material.

Modern advertising has changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, but when it comes to food, the message has remained consistent. Advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families. In identifying shopping and cooking as an expression of love, ads helped to both establish and reinforce the belief that kitchen work was women's work, even as women's participation in the labor force dramatically increased. Advertisers clung tenaciously to this paradigm throughout great upheavals in the patterns of American work, diet, and gender roles. To discover why, Food Is Love draws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This book is a portrait of American food -- before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional -- from the lost WPA files. An anthology with introduction and annotations of the unpublished manuscripts from the last WPA writers project, an exploration of food and eating in America in 1940.

Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.