The frying pan and the fire: Gendered citizenship and the American kitchen from the postwar era to the family values campaig

The dissertation examines the role of representations of the U.S. kitchen in debates about female citizenship, demonstrating that the kitchen is a terrain on which boundary disputes are waged over core American values: freedom and discipline; pleasure and labor; the organic and the technological; nostalgia for the past and fantasies of the future; and "proper" and "improper" femininities and families. During the postwar period, cultural representations and practices in government, corporate, and educational institutions constructed the kitchen as the nexus at which democracy, capitalism, and technological progress became indistinguishable from one another. Centering women as symbols and beneficiaries of that fusion, this construction also consolidated a vision of the normative American family that was to become the object of nostalgia into and beyond the conservative revolution of the 1980s. But this image of the kitchen was challenged and reworked, both by the white women who were its explicit objects and by the voices it excluded. In the 1950s Asian American authors used images of the kitchen to theorize the relationship between ethnicity and citizenship, while at the same time, the representations of Asian food in women's magazines stressed an ethical imperative for white, middle-class American women to educate their children as antiracist and cosmopolitan citizens appropriate to the Cold War U.S. role as defender of global democracy and capitalism. Yet by the 1980s, a new but disturbingly familiar national image of domesticity emerged, one that pitted (implicitly white) female subjectivity against racial and ethnic difference.