Serving up revolution : feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses in the United States and Canada from 1972-1989
Alexandra Ketchum (Author)
""Serving Up Revolution: Feminist Restaurants, Cafés, and Coffeehouses from 1972-1989 in the United States and Canada," is the first history of more than 250 feminist and lesbian restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses that existed in Canada and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Utilizing business records, advertisements, feminist and lesbian periodicals, and a dozen original interviews, I examine the ways feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses promoted women-owned and women-centered businesses and fostered non-capitalist and non-hierarchal business practices and models. The existence of these restaurants challenged the assumption of a fraught relationship between feminism and cooking and showed that the kitchen could be a space of empowerment for women rather than an oppressive sphere. I argue that feminist restaurant history reveals the importance of physical space for socializing, activism, economics, and community building. I also make a methodological contribution by utilizing a large database of lesbian and women's travel guides, from which I created maps using GIS mapping technology. By including a study of feminist coffeehouses, this dissertation is able to spotlight feminist activism and community building additionally in smaller towns as these commonly temporary women's spaces could happen anywhere from a church basement in Iowa to the corner of a bookstore in Washington state. I ultimately argue that feminist restaurants produced fertile environments for political organizing and activism. The history of feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses in the United States and Canada is a history of business practices, political activism, and food politics"-- Author's abstract
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2018
McGill University Libraries, [Montreal], 2018