Mothering the Right Way: American Public Motherhood and Food Advertising, 1880-1929

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2009
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between mothers, scientific experts and food advertisers in the turn-of-the-century United States. Industrialization and urbanization created a thriving consumer society in the early 20th century, and at the same time created a new national community of women. Before the industrial revolution, women could not participate in American political debate, and their role in public society and connection to the larger world remained limited. This began to change in the 19th century as social action and consumerism brought women outside the home, and conversely, brought the outside world into the domestic sphere through the media of magazines, advertisements and child-rearing manuals. I argue in this thesis that women nationwide eagerly engaged in new, public expressions of their motherhood beginning in the late 19th century. By examining the records of women's clubs as well as editorials and letters written by women, I present a picture of their conceptions of their roles as workers and mothers. Acting to improve public health and child welfare, mothers projected their concerns, fears and desires for their own children into the work they did in public. In particular, women joined together in clubs to lobby for pure food legislation, create libraries and parks, and educate their fellow mothers about how to raise healthy children. Their work was a huge success overall, lauded by local governments and highly publicized in the press. I posit that the visibility of women's work and concerns ultimately implicated them, however, in oppressive webs of consumerism and scientific dominance. Food companies and scientific experts began to aggressively re-inscribe the concerns of publicly active women onto all mothers, distorting and exploiting those concerns to promote their own interests. Advertisers and manual writers successfully learned to manipulate the burgeoning market of public mothers by adopting their narratives of child welfare to incite fear. Their tactics were wildly successful, and fueled the rapid development of the food industry, supporting the introduction of hundreds of new processed and packaged foods in the market. Moreover, manuals and advertising homogenized American motherhood by precipitating notions of "the right way" to raise children which excluded all other methods as ignorant or even dangerous. By examining food advertisements and expert narratives in conjunction with records of women's work, I unpack the complex, multi-directional links of influence between the three.
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