Cultivating Victory by Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant
A compelling study of the sea change brought about in politics, society, and gender roles during World Wars I and II by campaigns to recruit Women's Land Armies in Great Britain and the United States to cultivate victory gardens.Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant offers an original look at the back and forth conversations between the women (and the governments) of Britain and the United States as they defined urban women's responsibilities in securing food production during the First and Second World WarsExhaustively researched, with an engaging set of illustrations from the period, Cultivating Victory convincingly lays out the shift from growing roses in support of home to growing tomatoes in support of troops, leading in the process to a more complex understanding of the relationships among nationalism, internationalism, food production, and women's roles in all these arenas during the twentieth century.
* Vera Norwood, University of New Mexico, emeritus *Gowdy-Wygant's ambitious goal is to cover a trans-Atlantic feminist history of rural gardening during two world wars, along with some individual collective legacies . . . she argues that individual women's patriotic desire to promote victory via agricultural labor ended up transforming them: not only in a material sense but also more broadly, in terms of personal resilience.
* L'Homme: European Journal of Feminist History *What separatesCultivating Victory from other texts . . . is Gowdy-Wygant's focus on scope. This proves to be one of the strengths of 'Cultivating Victory'. . . . A second strength is the substantially researched details about not only the policies and propaganda that both the U.S. and British governments employed to involve women in the war efforts but, perhaps more importantly, the attention that is drawn to the vital women behind and in front of British and U.S. campaigns for war support. . . . Valuable and fills a neglected aspect of war, gender, and politics. A final and significant strength is the extensive research on pop-culture elements and propaganda of the WLA and Victory Garden movements.
* Journal of American Culture *Although the institutional histories of both the WLAs and the victory garden movements in Britain and America are reasonably well-known, the approach of this book, combining a comparative national analysis with insights into the interconnectedness of environmental, food, gender and cultural history, does offer a new perspective on women and war in the twentieth century.
* Environment and History *| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822944256 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822944251 |
| Title | Cultivating Victory |
| Author | Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh Press |
| Year published | 2013-04-25 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |