Beyond Prefigurative Politics: Temperance and Suffrage Discourse About Cooking, 1870-1920

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Feminist Identities, Tactics, and Outcomes in Social Movements

Abstract

This paper advances a new mechanism by which social movement participants politicize everyday actions. Previous studies have focused on “prefigurative politics,” “political consumerism,” or “lifestyle politics” to explain how movements incorporate daily life into their activities. However, these approaches cannot explain how many movements—especially those that are not prefigurative or those that existed before the 1960s—politicize the everyday. I argue that activists transpose cultural schemas from the political realm to their daily actions. I test this process by examining how the American woman’s temperance and suffrage movements politicized cooking. I analyze 675 articles about cooking in the national suffrage and temperance newspapers. I find that temperance activists transposed the schema of traditional femininity to the kitchen. Temperance activists argued that women needed to continue cooking, for their role as family cook was crucial for preserving the health, morality, and sobriety of the nation. Alternatively, suffragists transposed schemas of gender equality to the kitchen. Their discourse about cooking proposed new ways to feed the family while easing women’s domestic work.

Author

• Stacy Jeanne Williams, University of California-San Diego