What Does Womanhood Have to Do with Capitalism?: Normalized Domesticity and the Rise of Industrialized Food in Annapolis, MD, 1870–1930

Abstract

This chapter examines how the American diet of industrial foods developed and spread during the time period between the Civil War and the Great Depression through new technologies and the domestic science movement. Intended to give women a place in the scientific public sphere during the time period that domestic production was being replaced by products made through industrial processes and factory production, domestic science was a gender ideology that embraced a new American diet full of modern, factory-made foods. Couched in the language of modernity and touted as an emancipatory practice for women, domestic science’s reliance on factory-produced foods was part of an increasing separation between food-producing workers and food consumers, and between nature and society, in the American capitalist system. Using archaeological evidence from sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this chapter explores the ways in which the domestic science movement changed the diets of residents and tied them more closely to the industrialized food system that became dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also explores barriers to the transformation of the American industrial food system and the ways in which food systems are closely connected to not only gender, but also to race and racialization and labor and social class.