Grocery Baskets and Bobbed Hair: Modernity, Women, and the Grocery Store in Toronto 1900-1939

This dissertation argues how the mobilization of tools of modernity, popularized by the Canadian Grocer and Chatelaine, and at times enforced by state officials, transformed food distribution, production, and consumption. The periodical literature reframed the home kitchen as an extension of the grocery store, selling both as modern spaces redesigned under the principles of scientific management. Using Toronto as a case study, this study starts in the late 1890s with the establishment of the Grocer and traces how women were pulled into modernity as workers and shoppers, over a period of thirty years, in ways unlike other retail industries. Between 1890 and 1939, new government programs, policies, and regulations increasingly intervened in the relationship between the market, the grocer, and the consumer. The appearance of the citizen consumer, including female shoppers who asserted their needs and preferences, gained new attention in the popular press. Such public debates about morality and consumerism during the First World War and the Great Depression forced many independent grocers and grocery chains to consider their reputation and responsibility as corporate citizens. Through the examination of periodical literature, this dissertation argues that modernity in the grocery trade in the early twentieth century could never fully cleave consumption from the ‘logical’ need for food that female consumers faced.