Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity by Amy Bentley is a monograph focusing on the American mindset of food that changed during World War II, as rationing severely impacted the domestic life of the average citizen. The author’s key argument is that contrary to common thought, most Americans were able to eat better food than in the earlier years of the Great Depression, in terms of both quality and quantity. The United States government responded to the chaotic changes that the Second World War was creating on the home front through usage of propaganda and legal rationing, Bentley maintaining that Roosevelt administration’s decision to do this was ethical; due to the constraints of this massive undertaking the nation
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Bentley collected information from the National Archives and many types of female-targeted propaganda of World War II, including public images that focused on food. The author analyses the occasionally conflicting messages of the government propaganda and other forms of media targeting women; where in public the need for patriotic sacrifice hindered the private need to raise a family the best possible way, domestically. The monograph also especially focuses on the sources of evidence concerning the World War II rationing in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Bentley’s interest in the cultural responses to wartime reflects her less than thorough evidence on bureaucratic aspects of rationing. The author also irregularly expresses interest in African-American experiences with rationing; including material that undermines her argument through the evidences’ expression of the limits of democratic ideals during World War II. Ultimately, Bentley’s evidence is thorough but at times overly so, expanding on specific aspects that personally interest her to the detriment of her …show more content…
In the epilogue, where other historians ordinarily summarize their arguments from the previous chapters of their work to bring together and fully convince the reader, Bentley instead peppers it and the other chapters with anecdotes from the 1990’s. Mentioning such contemporary phenomena like the absence of rationing in modern warfare and the growth of meal portion sizes only distract from the purpose of the monograph’s epilogue. While this could have been expanded to discuss the effects of rationing into the present time, these cuts into an irrelevant detail only serves to detract from her argument and conclusion. Though, the monograph does offer an interesting manner of argument concerning the domestic polices, a “down to earth” concept that would be informative if applied to historical events usually focused on through “grand theories” and the
Bentley collected information from the National Archives and many types of female-targeted propaganda of World War II, including public images that focused on food. The author analyses the occasionally conflicting messages of the government propaganda and other forms of media targeting women; where in public the need for patriotic sacrifice hindered the private need to raise a family the best possible way, domestically. The monograph also especially focuses on the sources of evidence concerning the World War II rationing in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Bentley’s interest in the cultural responses to wartime reflects her less than thorough evidence on bureaucratic aspects of rationing. The author also irregularly expresses interest in African-American experiences with rationing; including material that undermines her argument through the evidences’ expression of the limits of democratic ideals during World War II. Ultimately, Bentley’s evidence is thorough but at times overly so, expanding on specific aspects that personally interest her to the detriment of her …show more content…
In the epilogue, where other historians ordinarily summarize their arguments from the previous chapters of their work to bring together and fully convince the reader, Bentley instead peppers it and the other chapters with anecdotes from the 1990’s. Mentioning such contemporary phenomena like the absence of rationing in modern warfare and the growth of meal portion sizes only distract from the purpose of the monograph’s epilogue. While this could have been expanded to discuss the effects of rationing into the present time, these cuts into an irrelevant detail only serves to detract from her argument and conclusion. Though, the monograph does offer an interesting manner of argument concerning the domestic polices, a “down to earth” concept that would be informative if applied to historical events usually focused on through “grand theories” and the