"The City Ready for Tomorrow:” Working Women and Convenience Foods in Small Town America in the 1950s and 1960s

For 1950s cookbook writers like Poppy Cannon, author of the Can Opener Cookbook, the growing availability of convenience foods offered single, urban career women quick and easy ways to entertain friends. For advertisers and magazine writers eager to sell products, prepared and packaged foods provided busy housewives a way to maximize creativity without taxing chores. But for the women who lived outside the bustling metropolises and freshly sodded suburban tracks of postwar America, the technological changes that transformed cooking at the midcentury offered a bulwark against fundamental shifts in the American economy which threatened to upend traditional domestic roles.

“The City Ready for Tomorrow” explores the intersection of industrial and domestic technology in the mid-twentieth century through the experiences of women living in Calhoun City, Mississippi. Following World War II, Calhoun City’s economy was transformed. As small-scale furniture manufacture and agriculture declined, the city welcomed the arrival of the Calhoun Garment Company, a massive factory opened in 1947 that employed 350–500 people making boys’ slacks for Sears Roebuck. However, as was the case in other small towns across throughout the United States, the new factory employed mostly women. By 1923, nearly 25% of the female population in Calhoun County over the age of 14 were employed and the new breadwinners confronted for the first time the double burden of home and work.

“The City Ready for Tomorrow” demonstrates the importance of local history and its capacity to illustrate the complexity of women’s engagement with technological change.