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Feeding Fascism
The Politics of Women's Food Work
Diana Garvin (Author)
9781487551575
Paperback / softback, published 19 December 2022
292 pages, 32 colour illustrations, 49 b&w illustrations
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.63 kg
Garvin’s book is a fascinating look at how dinner tables, café menus, cookbooks, and kitchen utensils can help us understand the intersection of politics and daily life. In this case, Garvin takes readers on a journey through women’s experiences of Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s regime by exploring their cooking, agricultural labor, and industrial food production in Italy from 1922 through 1945." "Feeding Fascism is a fascinating journey through the food, kitchens, and work of women in an era of intense political ideology and citizen stewardship, where nutrition and food science, design and modernity were all used to facilitate that stewardship." "Feeding Fascism contributes much to our understanding of women’s lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship and is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the consent-resistance dichotomy that long dominated studies of interwar Italy. Fascists rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate what they were doing or to explain to people how they wanted them to act and feel. By subjecting the kitchen cabinets, factory cafeterias, ration cards, and recipe collections of the period to scrutiny, Garvin has brought the experiences of at least some Italian women into the frame." "Feeding Fascism looks past the gilded hearths of Fascist leaders, and transports us instead to rice paddies, factories and working-class kitchens. This important intervention in Fascism scholarship examines cooking, foraging, and labour in fields and factories to understand ‘what happened between rebellion and consent’ throughout the ventennio." "Feeding Fascism is for a general audience, and Garvin succeeds in making the material accessible – no dry prose or unfamiliar academic jargon here. By using the less-explored lens of women’s food work, she sheds light on a moment in history that threated to profoundly changed Italian culinary traditions." "Feeding Fascism is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on Italian women, labour, food production and policy, industrialization, and architecture."
Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labour. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.
List of Illustrations Introduction: Tabletop Politics 1. Towards an Autarkic Italy 2. Agricultural Labour and the Fight for Taste 3. Raising Children on the Factory Line 4. Recipes for Exceptional Times 5. Model Fascist Kitchens Conclusion: From Feeding Fascism to Eating Mussolini A Note to Future Researchers
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index