Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 11

Forever Lunching: Food, Power And Politics
In Ontario Women’s Organisations^
On June 8,1942, a wartime editorial on the women’s page of the Sudbury
Star newspaper reported that local women were adjusting their food intake as an
act of patriotism. “With the outbreak of war, the ladies cut down considerably on
the quantity and quality of these post-meeting tea parties.” The writer was convinced
that, “this step will, more than likely, be as beneficial to the women themselves as
it will be to Canada’s war effort. Women, the homemakers of the nation in particular,
do too much eating at any rate. They are forever lunching — if not at meetings, at
afternoon teas and the like.”- One could read the Sudbury^ editorialist’s sarcastic
insinuation that women did “too much eating” as condescending, stereotypical,
and perhaps even misogynist in tone. And yet there is truth to the fact that women’s
groups typically paid great attention to food whether it was wartime or not. Indeed
very often, the culture of twentieth-century rural women’s groups in Ontario did
revolve around food. The real question of interest is this: How did women regard
these activities, and what deeper meanings or purposes might lay below the surface
of their preoccupation with food?
The material for this paper is drawn from my study of the history of the
Women’s Institutes in Ontario, though these vignettes undoubtedly have many
parallels among other women’s organisations across North America in the first
half of this century. American readers will recognise that rural Canada’s Women’s
Institutes have much in common with state-sponsored Homemakers’ Clubs and
the educational activities provided to communities through the extension
departments of state agricultural colleges. Women’s groups like the Women’s
Institutes (WI) in rural Ontario have traditionally fulfilled a threefold purpose
including social roles, educational instruction, and community work. Since the
end of the nineteenth-century when women’s organisations burst onto the social
scene, to channel the energies of reformers and domestic crusaders alike, food has
been central to their gatherings. At meetings sponsored by groups like the Women’s
Institute, women socialised over food, studied about food preparation, and served
food to the community.
It is time to begin theorizing about women and food in new ways;
specifically, we need to think about how women themselves perceived food- related
activities, and the meanings they attached to them. To begin the task of building
theories around women and food, the writings of Rosika Parker on needlework
provide a model for this revisionist task. Parker has shown that our initial
interpretations of "traditionally female handiwork” are not simply what meet the