M6D1: Suffragettes and Kitchen Soldiers: Women at Home This discussion addresses the following outcomes: · Discuss the ethics surrounding wartime activism and women’s fight for political equal

After intercepting the Zimmermann telegram 2 and in response to Ger- many's \"inauguration of unrestricted submarine warfare,\" the United States officially declared war against the German government on 6 April 1917 (Cornebise 1984, 3). This day marked the end of American isolation and the beginning of the United States' involvement in what would be termed World War I. After maintaining over two years of neutrality while the Great War happened \"over there,\" the U.S. government was suddenly faced with the daunting task of mobilizing both military troops and civilians into wartime patriotism and, most importantly, action. Governmental agencies such as the Committee for Public Information (CPI) and the United States Food Administration were immediately created to inform and instruct the American people in the first massive-scale, organized, and successfully run governmental propaganda campaign in the nation's history.

These organizations soon realized that much of the support they needed would come from within the American home; more specifically, from the women who were in charge of running that home. Organizations such as the Division of Women's War Work and the Division of Home Conservation were formed, and women became the target audience for much of the nation- wide propaganda effort. Appearing in advertisements, articles, government posters, films, and official publications, this propaganda suggested that women's work, especially in the home, would ultimately do no less than al- low the Allies to win the war.

In an era during which women still fought to participate in the electoral process among other things, the recognition of women's ability to change http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 63 positive and negative effects upon women's cultural roles. Though many women moved outside of the home to participate in public war work, the home became the primary and, some would argue, most important theatre for women's participation in the war. It would be impossible not to comment upon the culturally conservative nature of propaganda that sought to give housework the illusion of becoming a public activity. This article, however, is most concerned with understanding how the home became a site of national anxiety and national hope during this period of international crisis, and how the need to regulate this space became mediated through com- modity culture. As President Wilson said, \"we must keep the wolf from the nation's door.\" The discourse of the period suggested that women's work was responsible for keeping this door safely shut; however much this work was envisioned as transpiring within the private spaces of this national meta- phorical homestead.

Why Women?

By the time the U.S. government began developing propaganda strategies for WorldWar I, the belief that women were the primary agents of the domestic sphere had been naturalized to the point that it went unquestioned that women should be the targets of any home-related informational campaign.

According to a May 1918 Ladies' Home Journal, \"'it is our women,' we can say, 'who will make it possible for us to win the war, if we are to win it'\" (10). In the February 1918 Journal of Home Economics, Mary Aldis states that according to the public press, \"women controlled 85 per cent of the food supply\" (74)) Whether exact or exaggerated, such statements explain wom- en's central role in the propaganda campaigns of World War I. Women were essential to the workings of the national war machine that included both the (male) soldiers \"over there\" and the (female) soldiers \"over here.\" Writing during the war, Ida Clarke noted that \"America was the first country in the world to give formal official recognition to women in the construction of its war machine, and to recognize immediately, upon a declaration of war, its woman power as one of its most valuable assets\" (1918, 17). In order to win the war, the propagandists needed to win over the support of American http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 64 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' t wles am_'ericaines As Doctor Anna Howard Shaw argues it in her statement for the Woman's Committee of the United States Council of National Defense, neither the Government nor society can longer afford to regard women's efforts as merely supplementary to those of men, which leads to the sug- gestion that women should become integral parts of all bodies organized for war work in which women are engaged and their services accepted. 4 Women's war work, both in the public spaces opened up by the mobilization of men to the European front and in the private spaces of the home, became essential. These openings gave women a chance to transcend their supple- mental status and move to the forefront of national efforts. According to Alfred Cornebise, \"at the outbreak of the war, the total male population of the United States and its territories was about 54 million. During the strug- gle, 24,234,021 were registered for the selective service of whom 2,810,296, or about 12 percent, were inducted\" (1984, 62). Nonwhite men and women of all races were thus called upon to fill the vacancies left by the 12 percent of the male population who were inducted into military service. The United States Food Administration was just one of the agencies that aggressively targeted the increasingly important female American population with their propaganda campaigns through which, they were convinced, they could radi- cally alter the consumption and living patterns of an entire nation?

For an American living during the teens of this century, images of and news about the war were unavoidable, largely due to these propagandistic efforts.

The Food Administration's aggressive use of the popular press to target women, alongside thewillingness of many of these magazines to highlight the daily duties of women during the war, led one disgruntled reader to complain that the Ladies' Home Journal should excise the war entirely from its pages because \"we get enough of it without our favorite magazine heaping the measure\" (September 1918, 34). Women especially could not escape the war due to the government's aggressive attempts to harness the \"woman power\" of the nation.

The attention paid to women by the Food Administration reflects the na- tional realization that it would take more than the soldiers with guns on the http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 65 world recognizes the fact that modern warfare demands two equally neces- sary forces for its successful prosecution: the armed force in the field and the arming-and-supporting force at home: and it is impossible to predict which is more important in securing ultimate victory.\" With government recog- nition of this latter force, the propaganda of World War Iwdisseminated through library campaigns, magazine articles and advertisements, short films, the speeches of the Four Minute Men, billboards, church meetings, door-to- door campaigning, etc.--became virtually unavoidable. This propaganda shaped the consciousness, ideas and, when it was most effective, the daily behaviour of the American public.

It is worth noting that recognizing the importance of women's role was an innovation in traditional wartime political thinking. The Secretary of War explains, one does not ordinarily associate the making of war with the activities of women .... And so I think there is a certain significance, perhaps an indication of the extent to which our civilization has gone, when a Secre- tary of War says to the women that the success of the United States in the making of this war is just as much in the hands of the women of America as it is in the hands of the soldiers of our army.

(cited in Clarke 1918, 8) While it is ironic that the Secretary selects war as an occasion to note the progress of civilization, it is notable that he discerns the social significance of women's roles through the shift in governmental propaganda. Similarly, George Creel, Chairman of the CPI, states that \"Even had I not been an ardent suffragist, we could not have ignored the importance of women in connection with the war or failed to see the necessity of reaching them with our activities\" ([1920] 1972a, 212). The increasing connections between women and national productivity were articulated most clearly by the propa- gandists and political advisors of this period, who realized early on that not only the nation but the war itself relied upon women's influence, especially http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 66 Canadmn Review of American Studies Revue canadzenne dYtudes amg'ru:ames Inducting Kitchen Soldiers Slackers in the kitchen are as harmful as slackers in the army-- one refuses to fight and the other refuses to help them fight. 6 Due to the duration and magnitude of World War I, food was one of the most strained resources worldwide by the time the United States joined the war. Providing food for the soldiers and civilians of Europe, as well as the newly deployed American troops, became an immediate priority. Accord- ingly, the Food Administration was the first of the wartime governmental agencies to be founded on 9 May 1917 (Cornebise 1984, 87). On 19 May 1917, President Wilson named future-president Herbert Hoover Food Administrator (Kennedy 1980, 117). The November 1917 Food News Notes for Public Libraries, the offi ci al newsletter which i nstru cted library staff i n the dissemination of war-related information, states that Mr. Hoover recently said, \"Whether or not the allies win this war will be decided in the next eight months by the manner in which America supplies herself and her allies with food. We depend largely on accom- plishing this result through the propaganda which arouses patriotism calling for sacrifice and service from individuals .... \"(9) The domestic informational campaign during the war, especially as conceived by the Food Administration, was thus unashamedly propagandistic, which is in part why the government's \"selling\" of the war is of such value to the social historian. 7 Furthermore, it is the actions of the Food Administration that perhaps best display the national focus upon the wartime home and \"home worker.\" Within the newly formed Food Administration, a Division of Home Conservation was created... to promote in the homes the study of methods of economy in the use and preparation of foods, and particularly to assist the women of the country with the problems created by the substitution program of the Food Admini- http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 67 By saving at home women could save the nation, as is envisioned in a tableau that depicts conserving women in a public space waiting to ship off their saved goods to the soldiers abroad (see figure 1). Women's magazines of the period reveal the extent to which women were expected to take the central role in food conservation. In a survey of L, Mies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping magazines from 1918 it is virtually impossible to turn a page Suggestion for food float or tableau. o Fi! ure 1. Women are depicted here in the act of substitution and as the direct http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 68 Canadian Review of American Studies Rewae canadienne d' gtudes arnkn aines without stumbling upon an article or advertisement that explains both the importance of food conservation and the importance of women's role in this effort. So aligned were the missions of the government and the content of these magazines that Good Housekeeping felt compelled to publish a state- ment in its November 1918 issue to correct rumours that it was in fact a gov- ernment publication.

The magazines of the time depicted women's domestic activities as so sig- nificant to the health of the nation and the war effort that women became, at least metaphorically, soldiers in their own right. In \"To My American Sisters,\" from the May 1918 Good Housekeeping, Helen Fraser puts it most succinctly in the first sentence of her article: \"the kitchen is the housewife's trench\" (63). Fraser articulates the connections between domestic and military space that are part of what makes the propaganda of the period so effective and so indicative of the horne's changing importance. The sugges- tion is that the kitchen can no longer be conceived as a private space; rather, it has transcended its spatial positioning and become a nationally significant public setting for women's labour. Similarly, a poem from the Journal of Home Economics places the conserving housewife quite literally at a national table from which she feeds the European allies (see figure 2). The poem's metaphor suggests that the speaker is no longer isolated in her home because she can symbolically entertain and sustain the allies through conservation.

Even the kitchen table is envisioned beyond the typically private confines of the home; women's sacrifices and labour mobilize this transformation.

Such imaginings of the home-as-mobilized are the ruler not the exception, in the literature of the period. Appearing in the June 1918 Food News Notes, a poster made for a library display in North Carolina further reinforces the militaristic metaphor that transforms the function of the home through a clever pun: \"War Fare At Home.\" The home became a space for women to fight their own battles, and though ultimately private due to their domestic nature, such battles were propagandized as public duties. Becoming a \"Kitch- en Soldier\" became a cultural ideal for women who sought to fight against German forces, if only from within the confines of their own homes. One could, in fact, become an official \"Kitchen Soldier for Home Service\" through the May 1918 Good Housekeeping campaign in which a pledge http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 69 Dinner Guests At my plentiful table I had grown Quite accustomed to dine alone.

To-day came guests to sit with me:

England, France, and Italy.

I welcomed them to my repast, And begged they break their war-time fast.

To France I served my bread o f wheat, To England I served my roast of meat, To Italy my toothsome sweet, And, oh, it was good to see them eat!

We drank a health in the wine of cheer, And I must confess--though I own it queer-- That I had not known for many a year A heart so light and a head so clear.

And now each day they dine with me, My comrades, friends, and allies three.

With France I share my bread of wheat, With England I share my roast of meat, With Italy my toothsome sweet, And, oh, it is good to know they eat!

A savory soup and a dish of rice I find sufficient and very nice. MABEL KINGSLEY RICHARDSON Figure 2. Reproduction of August 1918, Journal of Horne Economics, http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 7O Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadtenne dYtudes arndrtcame certificate (67) (see figure 3). This contractual agreement plays with the lan- guage of enlistment and highlights the serious responsibility of those who are \"entrusted with the handling of food\" (158). Selling women on their respon- sibilities during the war, the pledge card makes the woman's promises tan- gible through an official paper exchange--something typical for wage- earning or drafted men, but rare for the nonwage-earning housewife. SIGN AND SEND THE member of the household en- I, trusted with the handling of food, do hereby enlist as a Kitchen Soldier for Home Service and pledge myself to waste no food and to use wisely all food pur- chased for this household, knowing that by so doing I can help conserve the foods that must be shipped to our soldiers and our Allies.

Address ......................... Figure 3. Reproduction from May 1918, Good Housekeeping, 158. Since the nation's propaganda campaign was largely run by advertising men and journalists, the war became something \"to be packaged and sold as any other product or nostrum calculated to ease the pain and suffering of the world\" (Cornebise 1984, x). The increasingly commercial nature of the government's war effort initiated a spate of advertisements that ultimately confused patriotism with commercialism, paving the way for the rampant domestic consumerism of the 1950s. Many commercial companies readily agreed to aid in the propaganda efforts by using the government's appeals for conservation to market their products in innovative and, not surprisingly, manipulative ways. An advertisement for Wesson Oil in the January 1918 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 71 asks us all to help win the war\" (66). The advertisement continues: \"He asks us to help win the war in the kitchen...,\" going on to suggest that using Wesson Oil will aid in the national goal of victory. Locating the war in the home, and specifically in the kitchen, unites national and domestic duties under a broader and perhaps more illusive capitalist agenda. Though the advertisement is wholly un-ironic, the large print statement at the top that reads \"MR. HOOVER'S request that you cook with vegetable oil may give you a new interest in this advertisement of Wesson Oil\" lays bare the ideological workings of capitalist marketing, however much it is concealed by a healthy layer of patriotic sentiment. There is no altruism in advertising, but the advertisements of this period demonstrate the importance of patriot- ism in advertising.

Other advertisements use metaphorical language to mobilize aspects of the home, sometimes quite literally into the space of the battlefield. The bold- faced slogan for Florence Oil Cook Stoves in the May 1918 Good House- keeping reads \"Put Your Kitchen in the Front Line\" (179). The home is no longer imagined here as a private domestic space, but rather as a public site of battle. The first paragraph of the advertisement is worth quoting in full:

When old General Summer begins bringing his regiments of fruits and vegetables to our kitchens, we must be ready to handle them. We must care for each company as it comes to our door with the maximum of ease, that we may be fresh and smiling for the next draft that good weather and bumper crops will surely raise. (179) Using the metaphor of war to sell its Florence Oil Cook Stoves, the Central Oil & Gas Stove Company creates the image of a housewife in the midst of her own battle fought against the backdrop of technologically efficient appliances and fresh produce. The kitchen is militarized through this dis- course, which validates and aggrandizes women's domestic work through such illusory comparisons to physical battle. Such articulations of domestic activity work in part to justify the growing emphasis on women's place in the home by making it appear analogous to men's public activities. The meta- phor of public visibility marketed to housewives of the period is at once a http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 72 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'g, tudes arnbr cmnes the ultimately private nature of housework. As much as conservation is being touted here, so too is cheerful and efficient labour being subtly pushed upon the World War I housewife.

That women could \"enlist in the Nation's service\" is common rhetoric of the period, especially in relation to home duties, as can be seen in an Ar- mour's advertisement from the August 1918 Good Housekeeping (see figure 4). The advertisement visually juxtaposes \"Over There!\" and \"Over Here!\" to create a parallel between the soldier being offered food and the housewife dutifully and patriotically using Armour's products to \"Help Save the Nation by Helping the Nation Save.\" This visual composition establishes a direct connection between the housewife's economizing and the feeding of the soldier, to make conservation efforts appear of immediate importance. This advertisement also raises a puzzling aspect of much of the commercial discourse of the period that links \"conservation of time as well as of food, releasing the Nation's woman-power for important war activities.\" This slogan implicitly demeans women's \"less important\" domestic activities while suggesting that women should be able to work for the war both inside and outside of the home; the slogan implies that women should, in fact, aspire to move into the public workforce.

Just as housewives could join the army and help win the war from their homes, so too could they betray their country by hoarding or by defying the Food Administration's guidelines. In the February 1918 Journal of Home Economics, it is clearly stated that \"ALL OPPOSITION TO PRODUCTION AND SAVING IS DIRECT ASSISTANCE TO THE ENEMY\" (72). One's daily behaviour within the home--the use of wheat, sugar, fats, or meat-- became worthy of national scrutiny and could, depending upon what that behaviour was, suggest a trespass in national loyalty. As such, women became both facilitators of patriotism and overseers of un-American behaviour in the domestic space. In the same February issue, Mary Aidis discusses her at- tempts to reform her wasteful family and bring them up to wartime stan- dards. Having found a half slice of bread in the trash, she \"told [her family] of my profound discouragement that this could happen after all that I had said to them; when, before their very eyes, hung the sign in red letters,re'To http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 73 Over There I Help Save the Nation by Helping the Nation Save By x\LqE food buyine nd whole&earted 'con \"e x-ation American h' usewives can enlist in he _' t m' gerxice. By real kitchen economy dray can most ,.:, :ixel Jo their part in helping to xsin tl e war. The careful d bu. ½r will be delighted to lear,x the superior merits of val Label Package Foods re , e hundreds of these quality foods, all bearing amous Armour Oval Label, guaranteeing highest Trere is vat'icB'--to m t cve taste and eve occasion; ng the Nat[ n's x tmtan- ver for .ripoft. nt war activities. Buy- he Jut r ,ff rvalion and the >s \"Oscr 'l ere\", lves use \"Over Here\"of Oval L I Pr xlucts sh, ps, meats, d' svo , ;examine, saul. vcrae practically eve ' f k 'mu &.der f ,r Armour's Osal Label FoMs. 00k That Lightens Kitchen Labor--Get It Free/ sln{s/oF Beln a Houlews \" tel how to vo ti ylng al ithout waste f X Over Here! rtno tt ' k ' ! DUCTS/ - '-'. Figure 4. Augus 1918, Good Househeeph g, S. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 74 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' gtudes ambr cames manager\" takes the Food Administration's home card as law and thus assumes the responsibility of enforcing the government's requests through surveillance and discipline. Such examples justify the titling of women as kitchen soldiers, especially for those whose trenches became such sites of discipline and order. They also help to establish the role that the food cards may have played in legislating household activities.

Emma LeConte Furman, a then-seventy-year-old resident of Macon, relates an incident in her diary of 1918 that reveals both the presence of govern- mental requests for food usage in the daily lives of women in this period and the ways in which information and self-regulation worked amongst house- hold communities. In her journal entry of July 26th, she writes that one of her daughters returned from a Red Cross meeting with one of the bits of gossip that Mrs. J... N... had signed a card for sugar for preserving 8 & got 25 lbs., then gave a party to her daughter--cake, ice cream & sweets galore, which being noised around she was visited by authority and ordered to show the preserves or the sugar. Not being able to do either [she] was put under a $300 bond.

(quoted in Stephens 1978, 222) Furman's entry displays the system of self-policing within the community that informs upon Mrs. J. N. as well as the swift action of \"authority\" that punishes her indulgent hoarding and slacking, to use the terms of the day.

Behaviour that was private prior to the war assumes an aspect of public ac- countability that further suggests the national importance of women's acti- vities in the home.

Domestic activities during the war became national activities, subject to public surveillance and standards in altogether new ways. The kitchen is the most often discussed site of women's domestic activities and it is here that women's loyalty and national worth could be evaluated. But agencies such asthe Food Administration had to figure out how to regulate activities within the home. Quite literally, they had to come up with methods for infiltrating the American household in order to change the nature of that space. Making kitchens into trenches and housewives into soldiers was not an easy task. The http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 75 for achieving these transformations and regulating the simultaneously private and public nature of domestic work.

On the Battlefield: Door-to-Door Home Campaigns A poor Scandinavian woman in Iowa cheerfully signed a food pledge card, believing it meant that the Government agents would confiscate her canned fruits and vegetables .... To this patriotic, self-sacrificing wom- an, and to many, many others in quiet homes, far from the vast sweep of the world's tragic events, whose names do not appear in this or any other written record, I dedicate this book. v According to a brief report from the Food Administration that appears in the January 1918 Ladies' Home Journal, more than 10 million families signed the food-conservation pledge, promising \"to carry out the directions and advice of the food Admin- istration, in so far as my circumstances permit.\" This means that half of all the families in America had, in seven days, pledged themselves to the support of the principles for which the Food Administration was created.

Herbert Hoover stated that fourteen million families ultimately \"signed pledges to carry out the conservation programs suggested by the Food Ad- ministration from time to time\" (cited in Mullendore 1941, 12). Though Hoover uses the nongender-specific term \"families\" to designate the pledge- signers, all other evidence points to the fact that it was the female head of the household who signed the pledges. According to Alfred Cornebise and the official government bulletins for Food Pledge Week, \"the target was the twenty-two million households which were to be enlisted 'in an army that will wholeheartedly support food conservation'\" (1984, 92). It is therefore not much of an exaggeration to state, as David Kennedy does in Over Here:

The First World War and American Society, that \"the Food Administration thus literally reached into every kitchen in America\" (1980, 118).

Because women were deemed crucial in the food conservation effort and http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 76 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'Sudes am rtcaines for directly reaching the women of the country was the personal canvass for membership in and pledges to the Food Administration\" (Mullendore 1941, 82). The door-to-door pledge-card campaign was a practical way for the Food Administration to regulate the traditionally private yet newly public na- ture of domestic work. Along with the Women's Committees of the Council of National Defense, the Food Administration organized this aggressive cam- paign, which began in July 1917:

The housewife was presented either by a solicitor in person or through the mails with a card for signature pledging her as a member of the Food Administration to carry out its requests in the conduct of her household so far as her circumstances would permit. After the signed card had been returned to Washington the signer was furnished with a window card to denote membership in the Food Administration and a home card for the kitchen, the latter carrying directions in the matter of saving.

(Mullendore 1941, 86) In a period of three months in 1917, almost 500,000 volunteer workers were participating in the house-to-house canvassing. A full-page advertisement from The Woman's Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense explains that the campaign of home registration \"is for the purpose of giving all women an opportunity to find out and tell their Government what they can do, in what way they can best serve, or what they are willing to learn to do if called upon. \" ø The home cards, which \"were supposed to be hung in the kitchen where they might serve as a daily reminder of the pledge of the Food Administration\" (Mu!lendore 1941, 87), publicly signified a woman's commitment to the war effort as did the window card, which was supposed to be visible to any outside passerby.

Once signed, the housewife became a member of the Food Administration, as can be evidenced by the propaganda of the Food Administration and in the language of the card itself: \"'Our Problem,' says the Home Card of the Food Administration, now hanging in twelve million American kitchens, 'is to feed our allies by sending them as much food as we can of the most concentrated http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 77 states, using the militaristic-domestic language typical of the propagandist c appeals made to housewives, Every American housewife was expected to take her place in the ranks of those serving their country. The mother in the kitchen, alone with her conscience and her memories, became a food administrator in her own right... the fact that \"food will win the war,\" and that every woman had been drafted into the ranks of the Army of American Housewives, sank deeply into the consciousness of every loyal American woman.

(1918, 62) Clarke's nationalistic rendering of American housewives speaks precisely to the public image being presented to the house worker. The housewife was asked to imagine herself as part of an army engaged in battle from her kitchen trench, fighting on the front lines for her country. At the same time, the reality of her day-to-day existence was unchanged: she was still being asked to perform \"private\" duties within the home, however much the propaganda suggests that these duties were the subject of national attention.

The home cards thus provided a public and personalized form of recognition for the privately battling housewife. Like a soldier's uniform, the window card labels the household as both a nationalistic and patriotic space. The kitchen card, visible to only those who enter the home, functions as a con- stant reminder of women's private/public duties. The kitchen card also estab- lishes housewives' connections to the \"outside world\" of the national effort, connecting women directly to their organization, the Food Administration.

Edith Guerrier, librarian for the Food Administration, testifies to the effectiveness of the home-card campaign not in terms of statistics or conservation figures, but rather in terms of seeing the country and the campaign's immediate effect upon the American landscape:

The success of the pledge-card campaign was brought home to me on a trip which I took across the continent early in November. In every town and city, house after house had displayed in its windows the emblem of http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 78 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadwnne d' tudes ambricaines Mountains, on the desert of Utah, at the wayside station houses in California, and in almost inaccessible paths of the Cascade Mountains.

(1941, 22-23) Through such visual testimony, we get a sense of how effective the pledge- card campaign was and how it became part of the daily visual surroundings of the average American. According to Guerrier's report, the home cards became public displays that infiltrated a tremendous segment of the pop- ulation. According to the figures presented by various authorities, approx- imately sixty percent of the population enrolled in the pledge-card program, which means that more than every other home in this country might have displayed their patriotic service in their windows and in their kitchens.

Inside/Outside: \"Freeing\" Up Women's Labor Who gives our nation its heroes?

Who bears the burden alone?

Who gives and gives As long as she lives?

There's a Joan of Arc in ev-ry home .... Part of the ongoing \"debate\" over women's role in the war effort revolved around deciding where women should be waging their wartime battles.

Whether or not women should focus on home activities or on public war work in factories, the Red Cross, YWCA, etc., was the subject of govern- mental and commercial speculation. According to Department of Agriculture Secretary Houston's 1917 appeal \"To The Women of the United States,\" every woman can render important service to the Nation in its present emergency. She need not leave her home or abandon her home duties to help the armed forces. She can help to feed and clothe our armies and help to supply food to those beyond the seas by practicing effective thrift in her own household .... The home women of the country, if they will http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 79 themselves in household thrift, can make of the housewife's apron a uniform of national significance. (cited in Clarke 1918, 63-64) If there is any doubt as to the potentially conservative effects of the domestic propaganda campaign, Houston's appeal should elucidate the repressive at- mosphere bred by the patriotic discourse of the time. Houston reinforces the split between the private and public nature of the government's call to the housewife through the comparison between her apron and a uniform; however, this analogy cannot disguise the real suggestion that lies behind it about the nature and place of women's proper duties. The apron is figured as an item worthy of pride, something that the housewife could wear to represent her labour in her home as much as the soldier could wear his uniform to represent his duties on the battlefield. However, the apron must be made into a uniform of national significance--it is not inherently so.

Housekeeping thus gains national value only through a public articulation and validationmor perhaps more accurately, through mythologization.

The apron as a public signifier of women's domestic patriotism is also discussed in Edith Guerrier's personal account of the war, We Pledged Allegiance (1941). Guerrier recounts a story from her 4 September 1917 notebook of a parade for which she was asked to wear a Food Administration apron. In the course of the parade she passed President Wilson. She remembers that \"he looked calm and strong and was even smiling, which meant his sense of humor had not yet failed him. I think that smile was for our aprons--it must have looked a little strange to behold a lot of kitchen maids trotting along with a huge American flag\" (1941, 10). Wilson's reaction belies the impossibility of women's roles in the home being taken as seriously as men's roles in battle, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary. Ultimately, it seems, the apron-as-uniform is little more than a token comparison--a marketing strategy of sorts--that takes a comic turn when it moves from an invisible private space to a visible public arena.

Seriously recognizingwomen's domestic labour in the same way that one rec- ognizes soldiers' or public workers' labour seems, in this context, a virtual impossibility.

Historically, women's labour has not been recognized due to the relative http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 0 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canaclienne d'?tudes am ricame. that the development of capitalist industrialization coincided with the grow- ing invisibility of women's labour and economic contributions to the home.

Because so much of women's work transpires in the private space of the home and is not readily comprehensible in traditional economic measures, the value of women's work is often dismissed. The propaganda of World War I tried to change this public perception, as much perhaps to validate as to motivate women's work. As Mary Aidis states in the February 1918 Journal of Home Economics, \"housekeeping has become a grave national problem; to it must be given the most earnest thought and attention\" (74).

The rhetoric of this period often attempts to simultaneously (and often con- tradictorily) contain women within the home, to make the home a more pub- licly recognizable space, and to make women's domestic labour quicker and easier in order to free her up for more important public war-related activities.

Home work thus took on the potential to become home business, as can be seen in Edith Isaacs' February 1918 Ladies' Home Journal article, \"What Every Woman Should Know If She Should Really Do Her Part In The War\":

\"Every American woman is in business to-day. She is a partner in the greatest business enterprise which the nation has ever undertaken: the business of waging war for democracy.\" By using the terminology of the business world, war, and democracy--three things that women historically have been denied access to--Isaacs elevates women's roles (regardless of their occupation) to that of partner, equal to anyone doing their duty for the nation. Similarly, in the January 1918 poster published in News Notes, the \"House Manager\" at least symbolically emerges from the home and enters the battlefield along with her basket of food for the soldiers who march along with her (see figure 5). But she is also literally labelled as a \"House Manager,\" phrasing that simultaneously utilizes the language of business with the location of domes- ticity. In this poster, women's productivity is imagined as visible and her labour is seen as having immediate consequences in the war; she brandishes her basket of food in a fashion that rhymes with the soldiers' guns. Though many women worked inside the home, the results of their labour were often depicted or enacted outside of the domestic sphere. The value of women's labour was publicly recognized, but the home worker became imagistically torn between the \"inside\" that she occupied and the \"outside\" into which her http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 82 Canadian Rewew of American Studies Revue canadienne dYtudes am&'icames Part of this concern over the placement and priority of women's labour revolved around the debate over where women's labour was most valuable.

In \"Where Will Kitchens Be?\" it is argued that \"women in domestic service in their own homesMwives and mothers--are feeling more and more called to render larger war service outside their homes\" (Ladies Home Journal July 1918, 32). Home work is thus rendered less valuable in comparison to \"larger\" duties; perhaps not so much due to the nature of these duties, since \"food will win the war,\" but because of the public nature of nondomestic work. As women's labour became more publicly recognized, it also became the subject of commercial attempts to influence the shape of that labour, especially in relation to the concept of saving women's labour and time.

The issue of household economy was thus quite relevant even amidst war conservation concerns. Many commercial companies marketed their products not only as conservation devices in terms of wartime supplies, but also as labour-saving devices for the housewife who, as a result of using their prod- uct, would supposedly have more time to do war work outside of the home.

As Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues in More Work For Mother (1983), so-called labour-saving devices did not necessarily save the actual labour of the house- wife. In fact, she argues that technology typically increases the amount of time that the housewife must spend doing domestic work. Some advertise- ments from 1918 speculate ridiculous savings in time afforded by the pur- chase of various devices.

A kitchen-cabinet marketing battle nicely displays the commercial con- struction of women's labour and time. Advertising campaigns for Hoosier's and Sellers' kitchen cabinets both concern themselves with women's work and the war. 2 In language that should by now be familiar, the Hoosier adver- tisement claims that \"the kitchen is the battleground in the war on waste, and the Hoosier Cabinet is the biggest factor in home defense.\" Again, the mili- tarizing of the home emerges in the language here, as does an emphasis on women's national importance: \"Worn-out womanhood would be a national weakness.\" That the home is comparable to any other public space of labour is also explored through the comparisons between the home, factories, of- fices, and farms as sites of equally important labour. The Sellers advertise- ment also compares the kitchen to the office or workshop. Such analogizing http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 83 point--why should men have modern machines to work with and not women? This mode of discourse appealed to the new national trend to recognize the importance of women's labour in the home as equivalent to male labour performed outside of the home.

\"Why,\" the advertisement asks, \"would any woman do double the amount of kitchen work necessary?\" This claim along with the statements that \"the Hoosier cuts kitchen work nearly in half\" and \"saves miles of steps\" typify the misleading promises offered to the domestic worker that Cowan discusses more thoroughly in her study. The Sellers advertisement makes similar claims, stating that the cabinet \"saves its owner at least a half hour a day.\" This is followed by a mathematical explanation of how the Sellers cabinet could save \"a total of ten million hours, now wasted\" if all of America's twenty million housewives purchased the cabinet. The advertisement's logic becomes even more dramatic when it concludes that \"this is equivalent to an army of women a ,zillion strong, made available for ten hours' work each day.\" In retrospect, such claims seem preposterous. The impossibility of the million-woman army reveals defects not only in commercial logic, but in the ideological bind that places women firmly in the home while suggesting that the most important work lies outside of that space.

Both advertisements represent women's labour differently in relation to their product. Framed by the shape of the Food Administration seal, the woman in the Hoosier advertisement hovers over the efficiently packed cabinet space and is thus completely removed from any labourious occupa- tion. In contrast, the Sellers advertisement shows a more industrious mother at work, surrounded by her daughter and cat in a scene of domestic bliss.

Unlike the Hoosier advertisement, the Sellers advertisement is focussed on freeing up women's labour: \"Release Woman-Power for War Work!\" The Sellers campaign uses the reduction in housework time to promote women participating in other-than-domestic war services. Instead of being the nation's most important duty for women, kitchen work becomes \"the house- wife's greatest hindrance to effective war-time work.\" Home labour is further devalued when the advertisement states that \"her opportunity for con- tributing to victory, in equal measure with her sons, brothers, husband or http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 84 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'g, tudes ambricaine. Sellers' conception of women's labour contradicts much of the govern- mental and commercial discourse of the period, though it is not out of line with the constantly changing and often contradictory conceptions of wom- en's labour. Though this advertisement insists that women's labour is only truly valuable outside of the home, any such encouragement of women's entry into the public sphere virtually disappears at war's end. In the imme- diate postwar era, women were again encouraged to settle back into the home as their primary site of labour. This time, however, the nationalizing and uplifting wartime discourse of kitchen soldiers and woman-power had disappeared.

Post War Re-mobilization Though written before the armistice, Ida Clarke's A nerican Women and the World War argues for the crucial role that American women would play in the victorious outcome of the war:

... to the \"dove-colored women\" in the quiet homes, far from the tragic sweep of the world's great events, will belong a share in the honor of the final victory just as surely as that honor will be shared by the private soldier in the ranks who offers his life for a cause that is just. It would be well for the women in the millions of average American homes, and it would be well for their country, if they could come into a full appre- ciation of how much their'individual effort adds to the final sum of our national effort. (1918, 12) Clarke locates the source of women's power and pride in the home. It is here, she argues, that women deserve national recognition for their \"individual effort.\" Unlike the propaganda of the period, however, Clarke emphasizes the distances between the battlefield and the American home, implying the iso- lation of the housewife in her wartime efforts. This may be the more realistic depiction of the two extremes, but it is also important to briefly consider the changes that occurred between the public and private imaginings of women's http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 85 One of the national dilemmas faced in the postwar era was figuring out how to re-introduce soldiers into civilian life. Jobs left by departing soldiers had been filled largely by minorities and women, many of whom were now faced with the threat of postwar unemployment. More than at any time during the war, cultural conservatism emerged in the discussions of women's duties in the postwar era. According to David Kennedy, the Central Federated Union of New York bluntly demanded in 1919 that 'the same patriotism which induced women to enter industry during the war should induce them to vacate their positions after the war' and many women, whether willingly or not, complied. (1980, 285) Once again using the ploys of patriotism, women were expected to return to pre-war standards for women's labour without questioning the patriarchal ideology behind this assumption. According to Kennedy, however, women did not exactly flood into the workplace during the war. He argues that \"in reality, women's employment in the war was limited and brief. About a million women took up war work, and of that relatively modest number, only a handful were 'first time' hires, constituting net additions to the female labor force\" (1980, 285). Women's volunteer work, as opposed to paid la- bour, would raise these figures substantially. Many women thus returned to a home quite similar to that occupied before the war and its revolutionary imagining of women's roles, however much this same home may have been reorganized by the plethora of labour- and time-saving devices which would purportedly make women's lives better, easier, and more fulfilling.

But what to do with all of that time left over from the use of labour-saving devices such as the kitchen cabinet and with no jobs open outside of the home? Kennedy states that \"by 1920, women in fact made up a smaller percentage of the labor force than they had in 1910\" (1980, 285). Ironically, this backlash occurs in the same year that a constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote.

The ways in which the home was imagined after the war--by women, by the government, by advertisers, by women's magazines, etc.--is beyond the scope of this examination. What has been demonstrated, however, is that http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 86 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue cana&enne dYttMes amg'rwaines perceptions altered the very nature of the home and home work itself. The newly articulated importance of the home and home workers suggests the ways in which everyday patterns of activity and perception can be altered by national discourse, especially when this discourse is filtered through the commercial lens of popular culture. Endnotes A version of this paper was originally presented at the 1997 Social Moves conference held at Tulane University in New Orleans. I would like to thank those present at the panel for their lively con- versation and interest in my research, particularly Priscilla Walton of Carleton University. Many thanks are also due to Barbara Carson of the Smithsonian Institution for her guidance, and to Devon Orgeron at the University of Maryland for his immensely valu' le comments on various drafts of this essay.

1. From Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne's 1918 song \"For Your Boy and My Boy (Buy Bonds! Buy Bonds!),\" copyrighted by Jerome H. Remick & Co., New York. Frederick Vogel argues that this song \"best served the purpose of enlisting mothers and all other civilians as co-equal shareholders in victory\" (1995, 53-54). 2. In January 1917, British cryptographers decoded a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann regarding a potential German alliance with Mexico. The Zimmermann telegram promised financial assistance and the recovery of U.S. territory in exchange for Mexican military support. 2. In Histo.ry o['tbe United States Food Administration, William Mullendore puts this figure at eighty percent (1941, 82). 3. Ladies' Home Journal, March 1918.

4. While the focus of this article limits my exploration of the important race-related issues of this era, it would be interesting to explore governmental and media attempts to address nonwhite Americans during the war. The magazines I am examining here are clearly meant for white women and thus ignore, much as my analysis does, nonwhite women and men. 5. USFA Library Newsletter No. 16, October 1918. Quoted in Edith Guerrier's We Pledged Allegience (1941, 37). 6. It is worth noting that unlike Germany's propaganda which was \"based on lies and evil,\" \"the propaganda of the United States government from the beginning has been an appeal to the best that is in us and an unvarnished presentation of the truth. Therefore it has won, and therefore it will continue to win\" (Food News Notes #10, July 1918). Such oppositions of good/evfi, truth/lies, allies/Germany, pervade the discourse of the period and help to justify the omni- presence of \"truthful\" propaganda on American soil. 7. Food Administrators issued home-canning certificates to housewives, which allowed them to buy twenty-five pounds of sugar at a time to encourage home canning (Mullendore 1941, 112). 8. Dedication to Ida Clarke's American Women and the World War, 1918. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Marsha Gordon / 87 10. From the 1918 song ' You're the Greatest Little Mothers in the World (Mothers of America),\" copyrighted by Waterson, Berlin & Snyder, in Frederick Vogel's World War ISongs (1995, 409). 11. The Hoosier's advertisement appears in the March 1918 Good Housekeeping (144) and the Sellers' advertisement appears in the November 1918 Good Housekeeping (147). Works Cited Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home 0 ø Work. New York: Oxford University Press.

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__. [1920] 1972b. The Creel Report: Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Intbrmation 19 7:I9 8:1919. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press. Guerrier, Edith. 1941. We Pledged Allegience: A Librarian's Intimate Story of the UnitedStates Food Administration. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kennedy, David. 1980. Over Here: The First World War and Anterican Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Mullendore, William Clinton. 1941. History of the United States FoodAdministration 917-1919. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stephens, Lester. (ed.) 1978. \"A Righteous Aim: Emma LeConte Furman's 1918 Diary,\" Georgia Historical Qua vterly 62: 213-24. Trask, David F. (ed.) 1970. World War I At Home: Readings on American Life 1914-1920. New York: State University of New York at Stony Brook. Vaughn, Stephen. 1980. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Commtttee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Vogel, Frederick. 1995. WorldWar I Songs: A History and Dictionary of Popular American Patriotic Tunes, with Over 300 Complete Lyric. . North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Ward, Larry Wayne. 1985. The Motion Picture Goes to War The U.S. Government Film Effort During World War I. Ann Arbor: LIMI Research Press. Newspapers and Periodicals Food N vs Note. for Public Libraries. Washington D.C. October 1917--September 1918.

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Journal of Home Economics. Published by the American Home Association. January 1918-August 1918. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-029-02-03 - Mounika Indupriyal - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 2:44:54 AM - EBSCO Publishing IP Address:140.234.253.9 Copyright ofCanadian ReviewofAmerican Studiesisthe property ofUniversity ofToronto Press anditscontent maynotbecopied oremailed tomultiple sitesorposted toalistserv without thecopyright holder'sexpresswrittenpermission. However,usersmayprint, download, oremail articles forindividual use.