Warriors for Lower Prices: The New Orleans Housewives' League and the Consumer Cooperative Movement, 1913–1921

Abstract

During the 1914-1915 industrial depression, a harrowing food crisis gripped New Orleans and the nation. The Housewives' League, a local consumer advocacy group composed of white middle-and upper-class women, believed that President Woodrow Wilson's call for the south to feed itself could break the city's dependence on northern and western agriculture. However, the league decried retailers and wholesalers who monopolized regional produce distribution and artificially inflated food costs to the detriment of the family pocketbook. Avowing that an alliance between small farmers and women consumers would ameliorate the high cost of living, the Housewives' League, beginning December 1915, opened several cooperative curb markets across the affluent Uptown New Orleans neighborhood so that Louisiana truck farmers could sell directly to female customers. The Housewives' League thus joined a host of consumer activist groups around the nation operating cooperatives as emergency food distributors for economically precarious families. (1) Ultimately open four days a week, the New Orleans cooperative markets were sites of frenetic activity. Up to twenty-one produce carts jammed together 011 small plots of city land. Desperate for fresh and inexpensive produce, black, Chinese, and white customers arriving by car, by streetcar, and on foot rushed the laden wagons upstretched arms eager for their bargains. Patrons carted away their finds in wheelbarrows pushed by the small boys of the families, or baby perambulators, and gloated over [ljettuce as big and solid as cabbage, [excellent sweet potatoes, [t]he finest and tenderest spinach, and turnips and mustard greens, and endive and shallots. League members arose before daylight, rain or shine, cold or heat, and went to the various market places and sold ... fresh country eggs, homemade breads and jellies, and crafts. Farmers praised the arrangement, citing profits far exceeding those at public markets. (2) While the Housewives' League had yoked white women's cooperative enterprise to evolutionary socialism and social democratic thought since its founding 1913, league president Inez MacMartin Meyers hailed these cooperative curb markets as a revolution egalitarian food distribution. Reflecting the league's blend of socialist and reformist ideology, Meyers declared, think we are all socialistic, or will get there soon, the longer we find that we can't do the things we want to do. (3) To that end, the league's cooperatives provided white middle-class women with money-saving and laborsaving strategies so that they could devote themselves more fully to achieving broader Progressive reforms and women's enfranchisement. League women emulated national consumer cooperative organizations whose member-owners joined retail associations to contract directly with agricultural producers and distributors, circumventing the corrupt wholesalers and retailers whom the public blamed for perennial food supply crises. (4) Between 1913 and 1921, the Housewives' League rolled out several woman-run cooperatives--curbside produce stalls, World War I cooperative kitchens, and a grocery store--each of which connected rural producers to urban consumers. The history of the Housewives' League's cooperative projects deepens our understanding of how white southern progressive women's organizations operated the 1910s and 1920s. Viewing the Housewives' League through the lens of the national cooperative movement positions New Orleans as a cosmopolitan site of intellectual foment, a swiftly modernizing city emboldened by the circulation of international goods, bodies, and political thought. An outgrowth of the nascent women's club and consumer rights movements sweeping the industrializing South, the Housewives' League, whose inner circle consisted of Jews, northerners, and immigrants, believed that New Orleanians should emulate the socialists and Progressives who were erecting egalitarian global economic and political structures rather than kowtowing to the insular planter aristocrats who controlled the city's social life and politics. …