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Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism pp 77–101Cite as

What Does Womanhood Have to Do with Capitalism?: Normalized Domesticity and the Rise of Industrialized Food in Annapolis, MD, 1870–1930

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Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

Abstract

This chapter examines how the American diet of industrial foods developed and spread during the time period between the Civil War and the Great Depression through new technologies and the domestic science movement. Intended to give women a place in the scientific public sphere during the time period that domestic production was being replaced by products made through industrial processes and factory production, domestic science was a gender ideology that embraced a new American diet full of modern, factory-made foods. Couched in the language of modernity and touted as an emancipatory practice for women, domestic science’s reliance on factory-produced foods was part of an increasing separation between food-producing workers and food consumers, and between nature and society, in the American capitalist system. Using archaeological evidence from sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this chapter explores the ways in which the domestic science movement changed the diets of residents and tied them more closely to the industrialized food system that became dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also explores barriers to the transformation of the American industrial food system and the ways in which food systems are closely connected to not only gender, but also to race and racialization and labor and social class.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Price’s daughter-in-law worked as a laundress at home, and had two younger children in addition to Mildred Price (United States Bureau of the Census 1920). Mildred staying with her grandmother may have provided her mother with the childcare support necessary to complete her washing. Sarah Price may also have needed her granddaughter to help her with tasks around her own house and at her job as an aging domestic worker in a private home (Warren 1990, p. 30 discusses similar situations in Annapolis).

  2. 2.

    To counter the assault on African American worthiness for citizenship, diverse ideas were proposed by African American leaders. These included W. E. B. DuBois’ (2008 [1903]focus on developing the talented tenth, which emphasized the role of higher education in developing the leadership capacity of the most able African Americans; activist and African American women’s club movement leader Mary Church Terrell’s focus on virtuous and proper black women; and Marcus Garvey’s assertion that African Americans would only improve their condition under the protection of a nation founded by African Americans in West Africa (Crooms-Robinson 2012, p. 562).

  3. 3.

    Mullins (1999b) argued that archaeological evidence showed consistent national brand consumption by homeowners at the Maynard Burgess site, as well as Gott’s Court and Bellis Court. This suggested to Mullins that this preference for national brand consumption was not class-related, because the middle-class homeowners at Maynard Burgess exhibited similar consumption patterns to the working-class renters who occupied the alley communities of Gott’s Court and Bellis Court.

  4. 4.

    Amanda Tang, Justin Uehlein, and Ashley Dickerson also conducted basic analyses and number of identified specimens (NISP) counts on the faunal assemblages from 40 Fleet Street, 41 Cornhill Street, and 30 Cornhill Street between 2009 and 2013 (Tang and Knauf 2010, 2013; Uehlein 2012). NISP counts record each (complete, partial, or fragmented) individual bone, tooth, shell, scale, or horn as a single unit (Klein and Cruz-Uribe 1984, pp. 24–25; Peres 2010, p. 26). Amanda Tang also calculated the distribution by portion for the 40 Fleet Street and 30 Cornhill Street sites.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mark Leone for inviting me to work in Annapolis, homeowners for offering their backyards to our project, and the City of Annapolis and Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, for supporting my work there. University of Maryland field school students contributed important fieldwork and preliminary lab work. Amanda Tang provided thoughtful commentary on many of the issues debated in this chapter, and also contributed the faunal insights. My dissertation committee also offered indispensable advice on earlier versions of these ideas, however, any shortcomings are my own.

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  1. Independent Scholar, Washington, DC, USA

    Jocelyn E. Knauf

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Correspondence to Jocelyn E. Knauf .

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  1. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Mark P. Leone

  2. Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Jocelyn E. Knauf

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Knauf, J. (2015). What Does Womanhood Have to Do with Capitalism?: Normalized Domesticity and the Rise of Industrialized Food in Annapolis, MD, 1870–1930. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_4

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