Book Review of Politics of the Pantry by Emily E. LB. Twarog

Abstract

One reason that organized labor’s options seem so limited today is that we often have too narrow an understanding of the battles that twentieth-century working-class  people waged. In fact, working people long leveraged multiple levers of power alongside state-sanctioned collective bargaining in order to improve their larger lives.Emily E. LB. Twarog’s Politics of the Pantry puts housewives’ campaigns around food issues back into labor history and puts the home and community, rather than the  workplace, at the center of her story. In doing so, she revives a lost history of women’s labor activism that complicates and enriches current debates about labor’s future.