Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity

Victory gardens, ration books. While men fought overseas, women fought the war at home, by going to work and, more subtly, by feeding their families. Mandatory food rationing during World War II challenged, for the first time, the image of the United States as a land of plenty and collapsed the boundaries between women's public and private lives by declaring home production and consumption to be political activities.