Class and Gender Anxieties in Weimar Nutritional Discourse: Max Rubner’s Volksernhrung

By Novero, Cecilia

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES A MAJOR GERMAN NUTRITIONAL TEXT, Deutschlands Volksernhrung: Zeitgemasse Betrachtungen (Germany’s Popular Nutrition: Actual Observations, DVE below) published in 1930 by Max Rubner, a leading nutritional scientist of the Weimar Republic. This text is important in the field of nutrition, as I will show in brief below. However my interest in this text has less to do with nutritional science per se and more to do with this science’s participation in the dominant (masculine) cultural discourses of the Weimar Republic from 1919 through 1933. Nutritional science represents a field that remains significantly underexplored in the various eloquent cultural histories of these troubled yet exciting years of German history. I argue that this science was not only fully immersed in the cultural and political debates tackled by both the popular press and prominent cultural critics, but it also shared in some of the prevalent political anxieties regarding the social effects-class and gender-brought about by Germany’s promotion of rapid “heavy” modernization and rationalization in those years. Although nutritional science evinced a progressive impulse (it was, e.g., concerned with improving the diet of laborers) it arrived at a more conservative point of diagnosing a decline of German culture and attributing this decline to the changed social position of women.

This article offers a cultural and textual critique of the ideological and misogynist positions that are evinced in Rubner’s text, itself situated within the broader cultural discourses on women, consumption and modernization typical of those years. I draw out the links between certain cultural-political critiques of modernization (from the right of the political spectrum) and nutritional science’s self-described aim of rescuing an abstract VoIk as the only true carrier of taste, i.e. Kultur (Culture), against an explosion of alternative cultures, i.e., for Rubner, fashion. The “fashion” most prominent among the concerns of Rubner and others was mass consumption that, as Maud Lavin and Marsha Meskimmon (among others) have pointed out, was considered and constructed as the province of a single unified category of women, as demonstrated in the popular illustrated press and elsewhere.2

Yet the emergent and powerful Frauenkultur (Meskimmon 3) in Weimar was in no way singular. It was, instead, extremely variegated and dialogical, related to the different forms and degrees of participation by women in the public sphere. Women, though still marginalized, attained suffrage in 1919 and had started to participate actively in politics.3 They were present in public society as members of the working class (blue and white-collar workers, as servants), as intellectuals and artists, and as producers of mass culture (journalists, photographers, fashion designers, film stars, etc.). As scholars have shown, women publicly participated both as agents (producers) and as “intelligent,”"ironic,” and “skilled” consumers in these fitful years of Weimar culture. The ambivalent and multifaceted response to mass culture, insightfully analyzed by Lavin and Meskimmon, prompted the media to produce an image of the ideal New Woman. At the same time, though, the media generated a critique of the New Woman as at risk of becoming (part of) a mass society easily duped by the glitter of modern life and, thus, conformist in their appropriate but dangerous attempt to be modern.5

I argue that it is suspect to constantly make women culpable for the putative decline of culture or consciousness or of both.6 It is suspect for the way it conflates women with commodities, consumerism, and modernity gone awry. Rubner’s text, like other texts, often collapsed, unequivocally and monolithically, all women with the “uncritical” masses of manipulated consumers. Thus, after briefly introducing, in the first sections of this article, the main contradictions that emerge in Rubner’s view of nutritional science- a science which attempts to mediate among traditional cuisine (taste), modern efficiencies of food production and preparation, and science itself-my argument turns to and pivots on the text’s anxiety about the proletarization of the middle classes. To adumbrate: in Rubner’s text, the declining middle classes are rendered as increasingly proletarized “masses.” The anxiety is focused on the effects of proleterization on women and, accordingly, is an anxiety about the decline of Kultur. The decline is lamentable, for Rubner, not because the proletariat is in itself threatening but rather because the middle-class bearers of culture were, through their proletarization, losing their proper leadership role. Moreover, this change was accelerated by the rise of women as “mass” consumers. Thus mass culture was “a site for the expression of anxieties, desires, fears, and hopes about women’s rapidly transforming identities” (Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife 2).

In the 1920s, mass culture, particularly film and advertising, was considered the province of women …. Mass cultural products such as the illustrated newspapers that depended on consumer advertising were full of images of Weimar’s New Woman, multifaceted symbol of modernity. In general, much mass-cultural imagery represented and/or was aimed at women. New Woman images often connoted gender ambiguity and the possibility of change in traditional gender roles. (Lavin, Clean New World 42)

Elsewhere Lavin adds:

For my purposes, the New Woman is best considered as a cumulative perception of female stereotypes, collected over time by women newly self-conscious of their modern status-and by their observers. Changes in women’s status during the Weimar Republic were dramatic, especially compared with the years of Kaiser WiIhelm II’s rule (1888- 1918). In the years following World War I, the numbers of women working for wages slowly increased, and rationalization in factories and offices opened up new employment possibilities. It was acceptable for young women to live and work on their own in the city, and urban attitudes toward sexual behavior became more permissive than before. More marriages occurred and more married women worked for wages. But at the same time, illegal abortion was a widespread phenomenon, and there was a continual decline in the birth rate. Despite the social upheaval, the economic situation of most women did not improve …. Thus the much-vaunted “modern” status of Weimar women was not monolithic. There was much about women’s lives that remained rooted in traditional hierarchies and ways of life. (Cut with the Kitchen Knife 4-5)7

I suggest that these concerns may be fruitfully examined within the framework of culture and media critic Siegfried Kracauer’s writings about the rise of the “employee class” and, even more broadly, with the backdrops of the quintessential German preoccupation with the culture versus civilization debate on the one hand, and of the complex construct of the New Woman on the other.

I pose three questions. First, why does Rubner construct middle- class women-and girls-as blameworthy for the decline of cultivated taste? second, how and why does his exploration of nutrition juxtapose (bourgeois) notions of enlightened rationality against the early twentieth-century processes of modernization and “rationalization” introduced by capital (such as Taylorism and Fordism)? Third, how are these two kinds of anxieties connected, i.e., on the one hand, anxieties about middle-class women and the masses (as one category) and, on the other, about modern forms of capitalist rationalization? In my reading of this text, Rubner seems to believe that proletarization and consumerism are interrelated deviations from the proper course of history. Nutritional science can, in his view, set history again on track. The proletarized masses-distinct, it must be noted, from the “actual” proletariat- and in particular women as the major component of these masses appear, here, as a threat to the cultural values of what Rubner, according to the current definition of these years, calls the “Mittelstand” (middle classes, not yet declined) and what I call the bourgeoisie. In nutritional terms, Rubner identifies the “threat” posed to the “Mittelstand” with a vanishing “mixed diet.” This is a threat to the established hierarchies between national culture, history, and social class organized around taste as a “natural” and rational means of distinction. It is an unwelcome development on Rubner’s account.

DVE merits attention for at least two reasons. First it was Rubner who, as Professor of Nutrition at the University of Berlin, founded the influential Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Arbeitsphysiologie in Berlin in 1913. He thus can be considered one of the progenitors of nutritional science. The Institute focused its nutritional research on a range of physiological concerns related (at least originally) to the study of labor. In these years, roughly from 1913 until 1918, Rubner served as an advisor to the government, to the military, and for internal security (i.e., Prussian prisons), with regard to food and health policy. With the advent of war, he focused all of the Institute’s attentions \on questions of wartime nutrition and diet, emphasizing the issue of physiological efficiency. Second, as late as 1930 Rubner remained the most influential analyst of nutrition in Germany or, more precisely, of German nutritional practices. The publication under scrutiny here evinces his importance in that Rubner’s essay concludes the series by the Ministry for Nutrition and Agriculture on the subject and does so, moreover, authoritatively. His charge in DVE is to provide a conclusive analysis of the nutritional situation in the wake of the financial crisis of 1929.

After the economic depression of 1929, Rubner’s position on women and housework was near the position of the conservative BDF (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, the League of German Women’s Association, the umbrella association for a wide variety of bourgeois women’s organizations), and even closer to that of the RDH (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine, The National Federation of German Housewives’ Associations). In this respect, considering that women were suffering from a backlash due to the dire economic conditions, Rubner’s views were not anomalous, not even for someone genuinely interested in advancing the living conditions of the lower classes.8 Thus, the study of this nutritionist’s text demonstrates how a supposedly neutral science actually fed on a monolithic icon of the modern woman and contributed to its “blind” reproduction. In this, nutritional sciencefostering modern diets-paradoxically followed the path of the conservative critics of modernity.

Proletarization and the Women Mass of Consumers

Although nutritional science originally promoted a progressive welfare politics, the “emergency” of the Weimar years transformed its raisond’tre into a normative and more affirmative discourse about the need to ‘ restore bourgeois taste and, more generally, Kultur (Culture). In nutritional texts attention shifts from worry about the classically defined proletariat-still identified, by liberals and socialists alike, as the group most in need of society’s attention-to worry about how the lower-middle classes were becoming increasingly proletarian, as far as their purchasing power was concerned. In DVE the proletariat are depicted as possessing a strong class-consciousness, whereas the proletarizing white-collar worker bends toward becoming, in his or her unselfconscious desires, the consumerist employee, i.e., the most vulnerable to consumerist/ confbrmist ideology. (Rubner’s understanding of the proletariat is discussed in greater detail in a separate section below.)

It is useful, here, to recall the work of Siegfried Kracauer because Rubner’s concerns in some ways resonate with his, though with significant differences. In “Die Angestellten” (The Salaried Masses) Kracauer, not only identifies the employees as white-collar workers, but also attacks consumerism as the ideology or “culture” of employees (224). Employees are, for Kracauer, the ubiquitous but under-studied new class created by monopoly capital: an exploited class which fails to see itself as such. He speaks, ironically, of a state of things according to which employees have to carry a “morally pink” complexion (just like in America):

A morally pink complexion: the combination of these two concepts suddenly makes manifest the everyday life that is displayed in shopwindows, by the employees, and on the illustrated magazines. Their moral must be colored in pink and this pink must have a moral hue. This is the desire of those who are in charge of selecting: they would like to cover life with a veneer that conceals its reality, one that is all but pink.

(My translation, 223)

Language, clothes, gestures and physiognomies become uniform . . . . This is a natural selection that takes place under the pressure of social relations. It is clearly supported by the economy and produces consumerist needs in accordance with it.

(My translation, 224)

Taking Berlin to be the privileged site for exploring this new class he adds:

Berlin today is the city with the culture most typical of the employees, that is a culture that is made by employees for employees, and that the majority of the employees considers culture. Only in Berlin, where the ties with tradition and the origins have been so radically repudiated that the weekend (in English) can be a big fashion, only in Berlin can one grasp the reality of the employees. It too makes up a good part of Berlin.

(My translation, 215 – 16)

Kracauer notes that there are, in 1930, 3.5 million employees in Germany, of whom 1.2 million are women (212). Every fifth worker is an employee. He remarks that the high number of women employees is due to the increasing proportion of women in the population (a result, in part, of the mortality of men in the war), the economic consequences of the war including inflation, and the need of a new generation of women to be financially independent (213).

Rubner, like Kracauer, is concerned about this emerging class. Unlike Kracauer, however, he wants to preserve the organic, traditional culture that he worries is evanescent with the emergence of this class: “one can acknowledge the decline of our nutrition, in particular, as I will demonstrate, from the viewpoint of cultural manifestations” (Rubner 53). Also, more than Kracauer, he is particularly concerned about the strong representation of women in this class, because, in his view, it is this new breed of woman that is most responsible for culture’s decline.10

For Rubner, consumerism blurs class distinctions through undermining the structure and culture of the middle-class (bourgeois) family. Consumers are reduced to scattered and autonomous individuals who view themselves as free agents beyond class identification (see also Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture”). But Rubner sees class distinction-and consciousness-as essential for the preservation of an intellectual ability that too is deeply connected with the care of the body, and thus stands for a total organic culture: “Just like with the neglect of clothes a collapse of the unwritten laws of an earlier class consciousness ensues, so the collapse of nutrition has an impact on the psyche … also because of the general discredit given to the body” (56).11

Max Rubner’s attack on both consumerism and proletarizationtwo side-effects of accelerated processes of modernization-is based on his not uncommon view that these undermine the structure of the family, itself the micro-community central to the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony. His call for the improvement of the proletariat’s living standards is grounded in the belief that competition between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes will maintain much-needed class distinctions, whereas proletarization will not. Class conflict will compel the bourgeoisie to elevate cultural standards above the levels of a proletarized mass culture. According to Rubner’s progressive-albeit non-Marxist and anti- feminist-views, with a basic improvement of living conditions (an improvement that does not overthrow the hierarchical gendered and class structure of bourgeois society) the German Volk would homogeneously support the politics of the State.12 In the nutritionists opinion, an improved state of culture implies better nourishment, more physical and mental happiness, and a healthy population that expresses its gratitude through consensus. This consensus however cannot be reached through a consumer ideology in times of proletarization precisely because it is just that, ideology, as Rubner’s text implies. Ideology is here distinct from Kultur, as the culture that historically accompanies the development of a nation.

Consumer ideology on which mass culture is based becomes, for Rubner, the main cause of bourgeois culture’s crisis as well as a threat to professional expertise in general: “The popularization … of the teachings about vitamins forces doctors, often against their will, to feed advice on vitamins to the masses who hunger for health” (27). Doctors are compelled to follow in the footsteps of the masses, and science must become “popular” to be successful. Popular stands here in contrast with Rubner’s concept of popular nutrition and an informed notion of health. For the nutritionist popular only refers to century-long acquired traditions, specifically of taste: “The national and regional cuisine is a product of century-old exercise and experience and guarantees mankind its good health” (39). To this thought, Rubner later adds that taste is acquired not only according to regional and national customs-which are for him second nature-but also according to cultural milieu. In short, the class in which one is born and raised is fundamental to popular nutrition (39). He concludes that the varied nutritional methods and vocabularies all share the quality of a popular nutrition, that is, “the faculty to assure growth and the possibility to perform well” (40). Along the same lines, Rubner also critiques the upper classes for their elitist taste and excessive consumption. In 1930, then, he attacks the economic politics that favors a “plutocracy”-as he writes-which too lacks culture. Instead, it is the middle classes that should find support, as in other European states, for they are the traditional carriers of culture. Now the German “Mittelstand” lags behind the other advanced European cultural nations (41).13

My second argument-developed in the final section of the articleis nutritional science’s construction of women in 1920s Germany as a threat both to bourgeois Kutur and to the good health of the nation. Represented as “ignorant” and “fanatical” masses, women embody the most dangerous expression of the proletarized middle classes, namely the irrational consumer’s desires as promoted by modern consumer society. And while their irrational behavior is bad enough, Rubner, in my view, appears to be even more concerned lest this irr\ationality asserts itself as the cornerstone of a new group or gendered identity that might eventually strive for political action and/or cultural hegemony at the national level. Rubner’s text is extremely anxious about the strong “right to consume” which had started to transform the lower classes and women into self-entitled citizens with strong demands for the State. These demands further displace the role of the bourgeois and the nuclear family within the new economy. The implied betrayal of middle-class women is particularly threatening because they are the traditional reproducers of bourgeois cuisine and culture at the family level.

Renate Bridenthal and the other editors of a volume devoted to the women’s movements in the Weimar years point to the gap between anxieties about “national” reproduction, and thus about control over women, on the one hand, and women’s improved social and political conditions during these years, on the other. While women were expected to mediate men’s re-entry into the family and work, women at the same time voted in great numbers. Also, ten percent of the delegates to the first National Assembly were women. Although the actual power of women groups declined after the inflations of 1923, and especially of 1929, these and other anxieties about women remained or were accentuated (Bridenthal, Grossman, and Kaplan 7).

Hence-to foreshadow my conclusions-according to Rubner, proletarization and consumerism reduce the bourgeoisie’s cultural power (and the middle classes’ in general) while empowering the women within these classes. As masses of consumers, through bourgeois culture’s decline, women paradoxically emerge more strongly, or at least are at the center of many cultural and political debates. In a defensive maneuver, Rubner, the most interesting and visible nutritionist active in these years, attempts to re-establish scientifically and nationally bourgeois Kultur as the cradle of historical progress and a “rational” modernity. In order to do so, he mobilizes a hegemonic bourgeois Kultur with its “natural” rationality against the “irrational” forces of modern production and fetishistic consumerism.15 Women and the masses are the wrong “carriers” of Kultur, the misnomers of Rubner’s abstract ideal of VoIk. Thus nutritional science pursues less its original interest in ameliorating the living conditions of the working class and becomes normative.16 Before I examine more closely Rubner’s approach to proletarization and women, let me spend a few words on nutritional science.

Modernization Versus Rational Organic History: The Conundrum of Nutritional Science

Nutritional science was born in the nineteenth century as an academic branch of the new science of work.17 By the 1920s, however, German nutritional texts were published to educate a wider, popular readership. A dilemma surfaces in most of these works. Nutritional discourse relies on traditional customs and menus. Yet in the view of the nutritionists, modern German society requires a new diet more amenable to the realities of modern production and consumption. For example, surrogate foods and adulterants (Streckmittef) had been introduced for both civilians and military during World War I, in addition to chemical additives previously used to improve animal feed. Wartime nutritional science had also studied human digestion in the hopes of maximizing caloric output and finding (or creating) the fittest bodies for the job at hand. Like the science of economics (as well as the science of work), nutritional science tried to mediate between a traditional cuisine based on bourgeois taste (not unlike the debates around Kultur in the arts), and a nutritional (and thus medically and scientifically viable) recipe for a healthy, modern diet.

For example, consider R. O. Neumann’s booklet on bread, published in 1922 as the first of the series of popular texts about nutrition sponsored by the Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture, of which Rubner’s publication is the last. In Neumann’s essay, the reconciliation between tradition and modernity occurs through gradually familiarizing the reader with the new dietetic principles. Bread, perhaps the most familiar food in Germany, is gently torn from religious associations, its latent symbolism of “assimilation” and “union” (or “communion”) appropriated as metaphors for a newly scientific understanding of digestion. “Assimilation” is no longer between body and soul but purely a digestive process, a production and a consumption of material. Waste must be reduced and the nutritional health of the German people improved at all costs.

According to Neumann, the civic population is misled by its “bad” customs and tastes. As he explains, in the circles of wealthy people who believe in gute Kost (good food) bread is almost neglected. In the working classes, the consumption of bread is very high-too high a percentage of the whole nutritional diet. In the countryside, bread and potatoes constitute the essence of a diet of mainly carbohydrates. Neumann’s concern is focused on the nutritional issues and thus he disregards the cultural and sociological reasons that promote these two classes to privilege wheat-baked goods, Brotchen and “fancy cakes” over rye bread, a more nutritional food, according to his research. 8 More strongly than Rubner, Neumann believes in the introduction of scientifically viable and tested diets to be imposed, eventually, against popular customs. Taste functions, in Neumann’s narrative, as the privilege of the wealthy, something one cannot afford during economic crises: “One is then inclined to choose a cold cuisine or sandwiches, which certainly follow one’s own taste but not necessarily one’s own budget. Consequently, the volume of nutrition decreases against one’s hope while the economic cost of the food increases” (Neumann 50).

While Neumann’s first booklet of the Ministry’s series utilizes allegedly quantitative, objective methods of analysis that the author is at pains to flaunt, Rubner’s more comprehensive nutritional text, also devoted to a critical discussion of the social situation, examines the nutritional state of the nation at the end of the 1920s, explicitly engaging the internal contradictions implicit in nutritional science glossed over by Neumann’s pamphlet on bread. Rubner, like Neumann, endorses the world of science-in which he strives to situate his more socially oriented nutritional work-as the natural expression of cultural and historical progress. What is important here is the driving force of history, which, for Rubner, is intrinsically “progressive.” He contrasts the rational progression of history-supported by science- with the “irrational” call to nature of the Reform movements, which he dismisses as “sects.”"Only the few know that people were much more ill in the golden age,” he informs us, and then proceeds to offer the reader the results of studies made on the bones of ancient skeletons, which showed how nutritional imbalances due to hardships caused all sorts of health problems (35).

However, Rubner also notes that a blind endorsement of scientific progress is simultaneously linked to the decline of bourgeois culture. He has in mind the high rationalization of production quickly and instrumentally introduced in the work place in Germany in the teens, or else Taylorization in the factories, as well as the rise of a service sector of industry. But he is also thinking here of the presence on the market of more standardized products. All of the above contribute, in his view, to the rural communities’ exodus toward the city in search of a secure job, thus to the overpopulation of urban centers. 9 The growing service industry employs women and men from the lower-middle classes and is an indicator first of their proletarization, and second, and most importantly, of women’s massive entry into the work force. For Rubner, then, indirectly, the most threatening consequence of women’s participation in production is their entrance in the public sphere, in which they first take on the role of empowered consumers, and then, eventually, of political agents. The solution to the destructive effects of an excessively fast modernization of bourgeois society, Rubner’s text suggests, is for nutritional science to re-establish popular German culinary traditions, which were developed over a long-standing cultural historical process and solidified at times of economic and political stability: “Some good traditions must be preserved. Regional differences are better purposefully spared than fought” (63). The restoration of the art of good and healthy eating-which Rubner believes is central to the reproduction of Kultur and the cultivation of the national and popular spirit-will prevent the German people’s fall into a standardized, Americanized society. Nutritional science-an applied science-helps in rescuing the course of progressive history.

Thus, for Rubner, nutritional science is caught in a conundrum: while a modern science availing itself of quantitative methods of analysis, aiming at efficiency and embedded in an ideology of necessary technological progress, it gains its raison d’tre in 1920s Germany by identifying German modernity as an “abnormal” moment of historical decline, a “temporary crisis” conceptualized as a fracture of history. He literally speaks of “deviations from a reasonable nutrition” (Ahweichungen in German, 62). Rubner writes that alimentary customs evolved over the course of millennia, guided by experience and popular instinct in an organic and ultimately rational manner (5, 14). In the course of history they have differentiated themselves. Yet,

. . . since the mid nineteenth century we have encountered tendencies that attempt to intervene in the natural course of traditional nutritional forms and aim to introduce new nutritional habits and diets. . . . These are not popular movements. Rather they are [isolated] pro\posals, often grounded in misunderstandings. They may very well stem from specific ethical principles. The representatives of these movements see in our nutrition today a deformation, a danger, namely the cause of the decline of our race, and thus want “to go back to nature,” moved as they are by an incomprehensible mysticism. (15)

The regressive call to nature threatens to displace the bourgeoisie as the subject of history, and its culture as the repository of a valuable alimentary tradition, itself a sign of history’s progress.

The importance of nutritional science then lies in the objective it has always set itself: To correct such deviations in ways that recuperate tradition-or Kultur-to make up for the recent loss of cultural experience. So, up to the present day, Rubner writes, nutritionists, and hygienists among others, have intervened only with general and quantitative recommendations

. . . to limit malnutrition or excesses, to combat a monotonous nutrition, to develop the best possible diet for bodily development and growth, as well as for particular forms of mass nutrition, like soldiers, prisons, orphan homes, etc. These suggestions aimed at preserving the commonly customary forms of nutritional provisions within the framework of the national capabilities. (15)

Of all the 1920s nutritional pamphlets, Rubner’s text best illuminates the nexus between nutritional science qua science and the pressures exerted by its social, political, and cultural functions. Thus Rubner’s text, which in many ways is informed by a sincere interest in ameliorating the nutritional conditions of the less fortunate classes, also brings to the fore an anxious position (that turns conservative with regard to women) when it comes to the emergence of new social agents who, in his view, destabilize bourgeois tradition, such as women and the masses.

The Nutritionist’s Critique of Capitalist Forms of Rationalization

The nutritionist’s critique of capitalism is mostly grounded in the ideal of Volk, a populist notion of the people that loosely draws on a national-if not nationalist-understanding of Kultur.20 The VoIk embodies, for Rubner, the organic rationality of a history that has as its agent the middle classes, and as its product bourgeois culture. Each Volk is defined according to “national” differences. Exemplary KuIturvlker are France and Austria.

We have had so far two centers of refined cuisines in Europe: France and Austria. Each one has its peculiarities; both, however, have stressed the elevation of raw foodstuff to provide a refined pleasure. The Frenchman is a great artist in everything that concerns the preparation of meat dishes … In contrast, Austrian cuisine excels especially for its variety of soups, sweets, and baked goods. (42)

For Rubner, the relevant feature shared by both Austrian and French cuisines is that which raises humans above nature: the quintessential cultural moment of cooking, indicating the passage from raw to cooked, and, especially, from cooked to baked. Cooking reaches the level of art with pastry, above all, in France. During the “Belle poque,” French cuisine was renowned for its fabulous dishes, which, as the French historian Jean-Paul Aron describes, were often edible copies of French historical monuments. These dishes came to the table on sculpted pedestals of ice, restaging the bourgeois diner in his privileged position as producer and consumer of his own history.

As Aron suggests and Rubner’s quotation confirms, cooking concocts a harmonic union between bourgeois history and art, providing one of the most elevated opportunities to experience a Volks-Kultur. The Austrian love of pastry and baked goods, which were often consumed publicly in traditional coffee-houses, the privileged gathering places of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, further illustrates Rubner’s underlying assumption that national cuisine and the bourgeoisie appear as inseparable.

What is more, the Austrians, like the French, are fond of a variety of dishes, a preference that happens to follow nicely the nutritionist’s prescriptions for a mixed diet. The mixed diet is essential to good nutrition because it enhances gustatory pleasure through variety and helps to ensure a balanced consumption of food groups. At the same time, the “mixed diet” functions as a recurrent and explicit metaphor for Rubner of the rational common sense native to the modern European middle classes.

In his handling of pleasure and the mixed diet, Rubner again displays his tendency to mediate between tradition and modernity. While nineteenth-century gastrosopbes considered the unaccounrability of pleasure in eating as fundamental to their gastronomic treaties, pleasure was largely dismissed by nutritional science in favor of efficiency, as Neumann’s example demonstrated. Rubner seeks to encourage pleasure again but only through rational, measured means of a mixed diet. Cooking then is crucial in the attainment of the “right” diet and “rational” pleasure. Thanks to cooking, raw materials are perfected and their nutritional qualities enhanced in different tastes: “The world picture of national nutritional styles demonstrates how nutrition builds on pleasure (or enjoyment, in German, Genuss), e.g., the mixed variety of numerous ingredients. Thus even within each national framework a great variety of dishes has emerged” (34). But nutritional science must intervene to correct dangerous extremes, namely when the mixed diet fails. Then it is this science’s task to set limits to pleasure unchecked (i.e., an excessive tendency to enjoy fats in German cooking [49]) or to break through a monotony of dietary habits born out of practicality alone (52). Nutritional science intervenes to re- establish balance, namely reason: “Once I stated, in the interest of a rational mixed diet: ‘In the context of a rational nutrition, vegetables and fruits should come to help, an excessive consumption of potatoes and bread should be reduced so as to enrich and improve diet’” (52).

If French and Austrian cuisines are the ideal, English and American cooking is the nadir. The Americans and the British are poor cooks who suffer from a monotonous, almost primitive diet. Rubner writes disdainfully that the British diet is known for its “roast-beef,” a dish that is eaten almost raw. English and American diets are also nutritionally inefficient because they are one- sided, unvaried, and thus unable to stimulate taste as the biological guarantor of an instinctually balanced nutrition.

The Englishman and the American especially are not particularly good cooks. With the same raw materials available, the average cook is not able to produce particularly tasty dishes. In effect, the aim of cuisine is not just to elevate the body, or to generate well- being, satisfaction, and a good spirit, but also to stimulate digestion. When cuisine is based on infinite variations, it is the best [most efficient] defense against any one-sided form of nutrition. (42)

Interestingly, Rubner ascribes the least efficient way of cooking and a lack of taste to the country in which the most efficient modern sciences of work originated, America, home of Taylorism and later, Fordism. Having established the deficient dietary background of modern American society, Rubner goes on to criticize “mass culture” as an American “import.” More precisely, he criticizes those societies where propaganda-i.e., advertising campaigns-lures the masses to consume indiscriminately or to follow fashionable trends: “The carriers of propaganda are mostly North Americans, English, and Germans. Most of the times it is lay people who introduce and support these movements. Yet in recent years one can find doctors too as leaders of such sects” (16). Importantly, Rubner lists the Germans as “partners” of the Americans and the English, thus stressing that they have fallen prey to the dictates of civilization (which Rubner conflates here with consumer ideology as rooted too in rationalized, standardized forms of production and consumption), unlike the cultured French and Viennese. Unhinged from Kultur, the German people hunger for what is merely popular, for charismatic leaders, such as the lay leaders of the Reform movements or sects. Underscoring that the people are lured to believe in information provided by lay leaders, Rubner is lamenting the breakdown of yet another distinction: that between mass culture as grounded in popularization and a culture of experts. The ultimate irony lies in the fact that Rubner is here, with this volume, making public the results of his research. However he justifies such move as a counterattack against the Reform movements (16). In line with contemporaneous cultural critiques of Americanism, he views in the German nutritional condition the decline of German Kultur, which he also ascribes to the radical (fanatic) “call to nature” of the romantic, ahistorical, scientifically ignorant Reform movements.22 German eating has become prey to the overly utilitarian (i.e., the Fletscher chewing method) or the merely fashionable (i.e., the Reform movements).23

Redeeming the VoIk from the Proletarized Masses

Rubner distinguishes the idealized German people, das VoIk, from the gullible and feminized masses of consumers, among whom prominently figure petit-bourgeois women and the “new” proletariat, or the proletarized “masses of employees.” Rubner’s VoIk is the abstract inheritor of the rational-enlightened bourgeois community, (since the nineteenth century also nationally defined). His people have little to do with the actual working classes, who represented a multiple threat to German bourgeois culture 19, following the Soviet and German Revolutions of 1917-1919. To be true, Rubner was distraught over the traditional class of the proletariat, which he did consider as truly affected by the malnutrition caused by urbanization. His work addresses the suffering of the poor and i\ntends to think about social remedies. Yet the text makes a point to emphasize the cultural (as linked to the nutritional) consequences of the class-transgressing phenomenon of proletarization: “Many exceptional personalities from the middle classes have fallen to such an existential state so as to be possibly identified as proletarians in regard to their living conditions” (54). For the nutritionist, proletarization of the middle classes involved the decline of the Vo//e’s traditional culinary culture. Most interestingly, however, is that the nutritionist combined proletarization and consumerist ideology as reasons for Germany’s cultural decline. He viewed both as the exceptional and transitory side effects of accelerated modernizing processes. Clearly his text displays anxiety about the increase of these hybrid new masses constituted by proletarized-middle classes, both “poorer” in means and culture, and, consequently, more susceptible to fashions of all kinds, rather than bourgeois traditions and taste:

Our age tends to speculate a lot, also in the medical field, namely it is inclined to pseudo-philosophical thought, to a combination of assumptions that do not undergo any kind of experimentation. The addiction to novelty and surprise is different from the healthy development of the logical chain of foundations that have undergone testing. Immature discoveries used too quickly build easy bridges for these imaginary problems. (36)

These masses pose a threat in that they establish themselves as the subject the most ready to replace the enlightened bourgeoisie now in decline.

French Historian Jean-Pierre Terrail underscores the necessary dependency of consumption on processes of production (see Terrail and Praeteceille). In his view, needs are created for the workers whose consumption feeds back into the surplus value of capital. However, as he demonstrates, consumption is often ideologically constructed as a separate sphere, a sphere of freedom, which is perceived to be autonomous with respect to production and work. Accordingly, the worker believes himself to be one consumer like any other in relation to the commodity; the fetish-character of the commodity is thus transferred to the consumer-worker. In reality, then, Terrail shows the proletarian lacks purchasing power. This lack is the important, albeit hidden, marker of the worker’s “otherness,” or exile from the middle classes as consumers. Rubner attacks consumer ideology and ascribes to the proletariat the inability to promote Kultur. He does not ascribe the proletarian’s lack of culture, though, to his or her minimal purchasing power, but, rather, to poor living conditions that do not foster the care for culture, and that humiliate human beings.2 The problem for Rubner, however, lies less with the proletariat than with the impoverished strata of the middle classes, who now live under conditions similar to those of the proletariat, and are thus unable to maintain their cultural standards, lowering altogether the possibility of reproducing the cultural and intellectual niveau of the bourgeoisie. What is worse, they are ready to mistake mass culture for culture.

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, Siegfried Kracauer noted that, in Germany, the wages of skilled labor and state employees gradually came to be the same and the number of white- collar workers almost surpassed that of the proletariat. These proletarized groups were alienated from bourgeois culture due to their limited means, despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from the proletariat, with which they did not identify. In addition, they did not even possess the proletariat’s class-consciousness and traditions. The proletarians live in separate quarters, they share social and economic conditions, a common history that shapes their identity and sense of class belonging, which is not true of the emerging group of employees. Lacking the traditional culture of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual as well as financial means, the white-collar workers are identified here as indistinct “new” masses, not entirely inseparable from the masses of women/flaneuses/ consumers. This is evident in Rubner’s text where women appear as prey to the ideology of modern mass culture.28

Crowded urban dwellings and new forms of food consumption wreaked havoc upon traditional modes of cooking. Rubner notes how urban planners developed low-cost housing projects in which working families shared kitchens, making the traditional preparation of a meal even more of an ordeal. In addition, many women started working outside the home, and Rubner complains, “The housewife has no time for cooking …. Thus many couples are forced in the end to take a meal outside the home” (59). Eating out was no panacea, however, as Rubner critiques restaurant food for being not only

… expensive, but also one-dimensional, limited in variation and taste. The cuisine in big hotels is quite uniform. They do not follow any national cuisine, but rather an international menu, following the directions that have been introduced to us on the continent first by the English. … The more the hotel associations pool up, the wider will one-dimensional food spread all over the world. (61)

Rubner offers perhaps the first critique of global culture, worries about the excesses of an international consumer culture that affects especially the more susceptible lower strata, the ones of lesser means. However, his progressive critique against consumerism at times of proletarization is culturally conservative, especially with regard to women’s work: women who work outside the kitchen- such as factory workers-are without any culture; domestic servants, however, being trained in bourgeois families learn to be “good housewives” and caretakers. 29 He also launches a critique of modern architecture for designing new kitchens in an impossibly small foursquare meter size: “with these arrangements it is impossible to produce a good meal according to the laws of our national nutrition. … Only a cooking dilettante could find satisfaction in a kitchen built according to modern architecture”(59).30

Even though the modern metropolis is contributing to “the destruction of orderly meals,” for Rubner the city is traditionally the crucible for the art of cooking, thanks to the admixing of social groups and the gourmet-loving class of intellectuals (Intelligenz) who prosper there. These gifted and knowledgeable “experts” (Wissenderi) are solely responsible for maintaining and evolving the cultural level (Stand) of an entire people. In Rubner’s opinion, the urban intellectuals are the historical subjects that best maintain a critical distance from the extremes of a divided society. Like the nutritional scientists, they partake in the cultural as well as the physical body of the nation. They take upon themselves the task of educating others, from the ideally united VoIk to the masses and, among them, women. Sadly, however, the intellectuals of the 1920s, according to Rubner, suffer from “malnutrition” both metaphorically and literally.

The third change brought about by the revolution in 1919 and the Inflation that ensued concerns the oppression and the reduced financial power of the middle classes. So far they had been the carriers of important cultural elements … [But] [m]any important personalities of the middle classes have sunken to an existential level that could be easily described today as proletarian. … Everyday experience teaches that the middle-classes have suffered the most; in contrast, the working class, in particular the illiterate groups within it and the youth have gained a great deal. Furthermore, the standard of living of the employees and the intellectuals was too sharply affected by this situation … The joy for life and the will to be active, namely the intellectual spark, are lost among the intellectuals. (54, 57)

As the intellectual class has been brought so low, only nutritional science can rescue Kultur from its degeneration and self- destruction, restoring a rational diet from the obfuscations of mysticism, fanaticism, and ignorance, the many false prophets who speak to the masses and women and betray the national and organic Volks-kttltur. The natural purporter of this culture (and the mixed diet) was, in Rubner’s opinion, the “Mittelstand” with its traditions: “In cooking schools one learns some good, but the essential was still the tradition of the “Mittelstand” in which experience has transplanted itself (42). The nutritionists aim at recovering experience-or cultural continuity within temporal change- that the exceptional modern conditions in Germany had upset through crises such as the war, the Revolution, and the Inflation.

In order to return to a kind of nutrition worthy of the “Mittelstand”, as Rubner writes, one must not recur to rushed measures as “only time will manage to help us overcome hardships” (62). Thus, “science,” he continues

… should not have by principle only practical goals to which to limit itself, yet, there where it can help the general public, it is in its interest to help it and with it the people, as well as to struggle against dilettantism. . . . Some initial work can be done and some small steps may already be taken today, if one acknowledges what we have discussed here. Reasonable people then will lessen the meaning of such deviations from a reasonable nutrition as we have encountered in the sects. (62)

The book concludes that the “right step to freedom” would be “to make oneself autonomous in matters of nutrition” (63). This reiterates, on the one hand, the mission of science as the just means that reequilibrates the excessive acceleration of an otherwise natural process of history, acceleration that leads into fanaticism, self-delusion, hysteria, and thus irrationalism; on the other hand, its task to work for a national “good” that only a stable traditional class \society can guarantee with its welcome common sense (62-63).

Women: Those Hysterical, Ignorant, and Fashionable Masses

Why are women to blame for so much bad cooking, national degradation, and bourgeois peril? Rubner’s explanation begins with the premise that women have an extremely weak character, prone to passivity, gullibility, a lack of critical inquiry, and an anxiety about being liked. Women are best in the supporting role, which they have traditionally played-reproducing bourgeois society on a material level, through domestic work and the raising of children. In an increasingly modernizing Germany, however, women have been led astray from their traditional roles, becoming prey to fashion, extreme Reform movements, and excessive consumerism, thanks to several converging historical circumstances. Although this position sounds excessively conservative, it echoes the anxieties surrounding the morality and politics of women that were most typical of the periods following the inflation years 1923 and 1929. These anxieties were manifest also in the bourgeois women’s movements, among which was, most prominently, the Housewives Movement (RDH). First, as Bridenthal et al. explains, the inflation turned the moral universe upside down so that the traditional values of thrift and saving suddenly became meaningless, and this constituted worry for traditional middle-class women (9). second, because of the inflation, proper daughters of the middle classes were forced to go to work, and traditional moral distinctions between respectable and “indecent” women were hard to keep up, according to the very same values of the bourgeoisie (9). Third, the bourgeois women’s movement also joined in bemoaning the supposed sexual laxity of the times, urging class supervision of morality. Considering the unionization of domestic servants, the employers of domestic forces, namely professional housewives, tried to create and keep a stable workforce of domestic servants by “marshalling the traditional ideology of women’s place in the home” (11).

One alarming trend Rubner mentions in his text was the fall in the number of proletarian domestic servants in 1920s Germany, due to the dire economic situation of the postwar era, which also had as a consequence an increase in servants from the impoverished middle class. As domestic employees, women of this class were estranged from their mothers’ teachings, he writes, and thus had an alienated relation to domestic work as well as to bourgeois traditions. In Rubner’s view, they lost interest and ability in keeping alive the family cooking traditions, recipes that were passed down from mother to daughter within the closed circle of the bourgeoisie, in pleasant contrast to cooking as a source of income and the commodification of menus propagated through mass publications such as cookbooks. Cookbooks, Rubner remarks, although they do some good, reduce a rich tradition to mere recipes. However, as domestic servants, he also remarks, these women at least learned something about cooking and thus were better off than the proletarian girls who instead were forced at an early age to work in the factory without ever having had the chance to acquire any domestic education.31

Hence, one important effect of proletarization in the urban centers and the commodification of domestic labor for Rubner was that girls were no longer raised to believe that their vocation was to become a “professional housewife.” This is why nutritional science, alongside the Housewives’ organizations, would have to instruct them, educate them, and thus compensates for the lack of a “reasonable education solely for girls that trains them to become professionals in a woman’s work” (52).32 Rubner quotes from an article he had written in 1913, which also echoes similar invectives against women repeatedly advanced by nineteenth-century gastrosophical texts such as Friedrich von Ruhmor’s, and again present, disturbingly, also in women’s own magazines after the crisis of 1929:

The ignorance of woman with regard to cooking matters is one reason for bad nutrition. Domestic education must become mandatory for the growing youth…. Women must have an understanding of domestic economy; they must know foodstuffs and their nutritional values, as well as understand the production of good and tasty fare. The basics must be acquired in school. No one needs such schooling more than the working-class woman, in particular the blue-collar worker, who must start to work in the factory early in her life and who soon becomes a wife and a mother, without having even the most essential knowledge about household and childcare. .. . There would not be any nutritional deficiency, if women knew how to go about these matters…. Men too ought to know something about nutrition if they want to help themselves in life. (52-53)

If lower-class women were alarmingly ignorant of traditional meal- preparation (and, as Rubner’s progressive impulse concedes, men too), and while the housewives’ association-in clear agreement with Rubner’s analysis-stepped in to institute and run home-economics schools (separate from regular schools, run by the state), the “New Women” of the middle classes were eager to run away from it. In the cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, working middle-class women (the New Women that in the Weimar Republic entered the public sphere) attacked their traditional role as a form of domestic slavery.33 The cookery texts here also show these middle-class women’s anxiety about their own proletarization, this time attached to styles of home economics. Sweating in the kitchen was a sign of proletarian work, to be avoided at all costs lest one become kin with the pitiful work-worn housewife of the past. It is not uncommon to find, at this time, women writers of cookbooks who promulgated new cooking techniques and products to maximize efficiency, adapting for the home techniques used by the Taylorized service industry.3

The uncontroversial social and political freedoms women gained by maximizing efficiency in the kitchen were nevertheless quickly channeled by the cookbooks, handbooks, and advertisements into certain approved patterns of pleasure: to consume, to be attractive always according the established norms, fashions, or bon ton. These approved patterns of behavior are bastions against deviant femininities, which could have sprung, for the nutritionists and other ideologues of modernity, from women’s entrance in the public sphere, whether this was the experience of inequality in the workplace or the pleasures of entertainment, such as movie-going, for example. In other words, the idealized woman must become a docile-predictable-consumer to the extent that she is not any longer a docile (domestic) producer. Rosenthal summarizes the general moral atmosphere of the age, when, in stating that, while the New Woman did not manage to advance much politically, she still was the focus of the debate.

In this culture, women stood at the nexus of the morality question. They were simultaneously seen as guardians of morality and as chief agents of a “culture of decadence.” … In the developing consumer industries, women manufactured, sold, and consumed new items, thus becoming representative of a new pleasure-seeking consumerism. While the “new woman” did not signal female emancipation or the collapse of patriarchy, she did represent-to some-a moral crisis…. All sorts of anxieties were embodied in this symbol and for political parties, government agencies, doctors, and social workers, real women became objects to be manipulated in an attempt to defend against such anxieties.

(Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, 13)

The New Women, then, pose new threats for Rubner. He maintains that traditional housewives are rational when they shop (for food) because their purchases (or consumption) are limited to a specific form of production, such as cooking a meal. Thus he upholds the morality of thrift and saving. Rubner smiles upon this production because it is local to the small nuclear family structure and helps to reproduce its economy. In contrast, women as shoppers purchase “irrationally,” i.e., not only in response to a direct domestic need. Thus, his fear is that they are undermining patriarchal family values. As Anne Friedberg shows, middle-class women start to consume in the name of exchangevalue-against the will of their husbands-and endorse modernity in the guise of consumer capitalism. The cookbooks of this era are evidence to this too. Produced mostly for middle- and lower-middle-class women, these cookery texts encourage a reduction of cooking in favor of leisure, which in turn is framed as the freedom to buy or, alternatively, to train one’s body through sports so as to face modern lifestyles efficiently.35

Women consumers had gained some power to threaten bourgeois society politically too. Belinda Davis explains how the role of female consumers had already changed into that of citizens during World War I. Women gained power as citizens (and contributed to the establishment of welfare states after the fall of the Wilhelmine Empire up until the FRG) because the State demanded of them that they demonstrate their allegiance to it by becoming consumers after the end of the Franco-Prussian conflict. Because of the new restrictions imposed on the home front during World War I, it is as patriotic consumers that women asked for more State intervention in the regulation of food demand and supply. Middle-class women consumers gained group (if not class) identity too, becoming more than just “loose” individuals endowed with a pseudo-freedom of choice. They shared a group power that was closer to the class- consciousness of the proletariat than to the group of proletarized employees, as described by Rubner.37 But it is mostly the “New Women” that, for Rubner, having assimilated this “group culture,” represent the greatest danger to bourgeo\is Kultur. In their endorsement of fashion and exchange value, they sustain the dissemination of mass culture, while shaping a modern, antibourgeois form of social identity. And, in Rubner’s eyes, with its women having abandoned or modified bourgeois customs, the social identity of the bourgeoisie risks crumbling.

Cut off from traditional bourgeois knowledge (and class structure) and possibly being transformed into avid consumers of mass culture, modern women are more susceptible to the seduction of extreme reform groups and fashion, according to Rubner. In contrast to the healthy, “natural” and yet “rational” pleasures granted by traditional cuisine, mass culture and its alluring fashions create new, artificial, “fleeting” pleasures which form an addiction to external principles and life-styles, immaterial goods that stimulate almost hysterically the idea of pleasure. The sects and their commandments are fashionable because they are based on this form of hallucinatory and feminized (hysterical) pleasure.

The fact that every new sect that makes its appearance finds its followers is understandable. There are many thousands of personalities who are unstable and easily prone to be influenced by others-mystics, hysterical hypochondriacs who occupy themselves only with the well being of their ego, who sentimentally watch over every function. Self-delusion too produces in most cases well-being and satisfaction. (34)

Extreme dietary movements such as the Raw Food Movement interact synergistically with a fashionable ideal of ethereal slenderness, an ideal that implies abnegation.

The supporter of the movement for raw foods needs no kitchen, no stove, and no work for the food preparation. The housewife is fully absolved in many ways . . . The strict and rigid application of this diet was to serve fashion, hence this sect will vanish once the fashion changes. The supporters of this sect were mainly ladies. (34)

Rubner is eager to point out that the ethereal, pseudo-spiritual/ esthetic appeal of self-abnegation-starving to achieve a passing ideal of beauty or efficiency-is not just egotistical, tyrannical, and unhealthy, but it is actually rooted in economic self-interest. The eater of raw food never needs to cook-or work-at home. Fashion serves a kind of perverse pleasure, substituting a sickly ideal of thinness for the biological needs expressed through appetite and taste, and for the cultural well-being guaranteed by traditional mixed diets; as a naturally balanced diet, which through its variety stimulates appetite, the mixed diet that has its fulfillment in cooking provides both the necessary fuel for the body and a sense of satisfaction through the enjoyment of different foods. Instead the raw food diet, by serving fashion, replaces the needs of the body on the one hand and the ethics of work on the other with a consuming self-interest (the pleasure of not-working, not-cooking).

Whereas a healthy or rational diet allows for pleasure and variety, the Reform Movements are tyrannical, in Rubner’s view, because they aim to discipline the body, limiting the sources of pleasure the body can in fact enjoy.38 The fashionable movements are undemocratic, because they dictate strict rules and discriminate brand alternative diets as unhealthy. Women’s gullibility is confirmed once again by these movements’ popularity among them. In Rubner’s interpretation, though, as self-delusion based purely on the external look and gaze of the other, fashion functions here less as a body discipline than a distraction from the transmission of tradition and the reproduction of true culture. Rubner argues that fashion is emblematic of the instability of historical crises, which are disruptive and lead to the temporary-seemingly modern-victory of appearances (Schein-and Schamkultur) over Kultur. Rubner decries the construction of a modern culture based on fashion, and the credulousness of women as the self-delusion of modern Germany. The self-delusion that came about with modernity however-just like fashion-represents a backwards moment in the process of history, which, Rubner optimistically assures us, with a little help from the nutritionists will once again jog forward in a continuing process of enlightened rationality: “there will emerge again a new middle class, which will go back to the past tradition and take up its role in society” (58).

Rubner does not distinguish much between proletarian women, middle-class women, and the supporters of extreme dietary sects, perceiving that they are inspired by the same double-ideology of efficiency and consumption propagated by the mass media-yet with different effects. To him, as consumers, they all represent gullible, hysterical masses of fanatics, who have suffered from the loss of their “rational instincts.” If both the endorsement of modern efficiency in the kitchen by middle-class women and the economic impossibility of partaking in such manufactured leisure on the part of working women are equally irrational and fanatic, for Rubner, then what constitutes the enlightened, rational path for women approved by nutritional scientists?

The assumed neutrality and objectivity of the nutritional scientist gives him the power not only to critique political and social circumstances in place of the impoverished intelligentsia, but also to possibly regulate the “working” relation between mother and daughter, or, alternatively, professional housewives and domestic servants. Where an accelerating modernity erases traditional female knowledge, the nutritionist replaces the lost mother in the mother-daughter chain of tradition, disciplining the daughter with his fatherly scientific and rational instructions. In the name of good taste, and the preservation of culture, nutritional science (here speaking as the law of the father) demands that proletarian workers, domestic employees, white-collar workers, and the New Women in support of the Reform Movements, all be or act like rational housewives. Surveillance of women’s relation to production and consumption is necessary in order to exercise control over the irrational side effects of modernization su