Awards

• Commended for CHA Canadian Committee on Women's History Book 2020 (Canada)
• Commended for CHA Canadian Committee on Women’s History Book 2020 (Canada)
• Short-listed for Shortlisted for the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards 2020 (Canada)
• Short-listed for The 2020 Manitoba Book Awards 2020 (Canada)
• Winner of 2021 Errol Sharpe Book Prize: awarded by The Society for Socialist Studies 2021 (Canada)

Overview

Radical Housewives is a history of Canada's Housewives Consumers Association. This association was a community-based women's organization with ties to the communist and social democratic left that, from 1937 until the early 1950s, led a broadly based popular movement for state control of prices and made other far-reaching demands on the state. As radical consumer activists, the Housewives engaged in gender-transgressive political activism that challenged the government to protect consumers' interests rather than just those of business while popularizing socialist solutions to the economic crises of the Great Depression and the immediate postwar years. Julie Guard's exhaustive research, including archival research and interviews with twelve former Housewives, recovers a history of women's social justice activism in an era often considered dormant and adds a Canadian dimension to the history of politicized consumerism and of politicized materialism. Radical Housewives reinterprets the view of postwar Canada as economically prosperous and reveals the left's role in the origins of the food security movement.

Full Product Details

9781487521813

Table of Contents

Reviews

In her book, Guard tells a fascinating story of this little-known but very influential movement in mid-twentieth-century Canada. -- Joel Trono-Doerksen * <em>Canada's History</em *

Author Information

Julie Guard is Professor of History and Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba.

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