Personal Prefigurative Politics: Cooking Up an Ideal Society in the Woman’s Temperance and Woman’s Suffrage Movements, 1870–1920

ABSTRACT

The literature on prefigurative politics currently suffers from an organizational bias. To reduce this bias, I demonstrate how the personal sphere can be prefigurative. An analysis of woman’s temperance and woman’s suffrage newspaper articles about cooking reveals that these activists advocated cooking in ways that would prefigure their visions of social change within individual families. Therefore, this article broadens the concept of prefigurative politics beyond organizations, expanding it to the home. I demonstrate that the home is a site of social movement action, where women in particular may campaign for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Altruism
• morality
• social solidarity
• collective behavior and social movements
• sex and gender
• sociology of culture

Notes

1. In 1917, after a merger with other suffrage publications, the Woman’s Journal changed titles to the Woman Citizen in anticipation of women’s enfranchisement (Jerry 1991). However, the Woman Citizen remained the national suffrage newsletter, so I use it as my data source from 1917 to 1920.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stacy J. Williams

Stacy J. Williams is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego and is also a visiting scholar at the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University. Williams specializes in social movements, gender, culture, and food. Her dissertation, “Recipes for Resistance: Feminist Political Discourse About Cooking, 1870–1985,” examines how temperance women, suffragists, liberal second-wave feminists, and radical second-wave feminists have politicized cooking.