Dr. Diana Garvin will present her recently published book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (University of Toronto, 2021) in which she 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 labor. The book 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. First-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, 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.
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Organized by prof. Brian J Griffith, UCLA Department of History, as part of his Interwar Crisis: Europe, 1918-1939 project