How 'Citizen Housewives' Made Food Cheaper and Safer

Today’s shoppers take many features of the modern supermarket for granted: Ground beef is sealed with see-through plastic, prices are clearly labeled on the shelves and known before checkout, and expiration dates are clearly indicated on packaging. But without grassroots organizing by women throughout the 20th century against rotting ingredients, high food prices, and indecipherable freshness codes, buying food in America would look very different than it does.

Emily E. LB. Twarog, an assistant professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has studied how “citizen housewives” pushed for such changes using the power they held over household spending. In , Twarog focuses on the female activists who defined the consumer-advocacy movement, from the appointment in 1964 of Esther Peterson, the U.S. government’s first-ever special