“Tasty and Healthy Food” in Everyday Women's Practices of a Non-Capital Soviet City in the 1950–1960s

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2021-53-1/260-274

Abstract

Everyday life of Soviet women in the 1950s–1960s is rarely a subject of ethnographic observation. This article focuses on such an important aspect of this life as purchase and preparation of food and issues related to cooking, providing food for children, relatives and friends in the Volgograd region while the economy was recovering after the World War II. Using ego-documents of a large non-capital region of the Lower Volga the study identified and compared the common and the particular in everyday cooking practices, clarified the attitude of women themselves towards the efforts undertaken by the state to facilitate their domestic work as housewives, identified semi-legal (bypassing the queue, purchasing “under the counter”) and illegal (nepotism) ways of "feeding" their families. In conditions of a hidden shortage of goods, women faced many difficulties (queues, shortages, deprivations), but continued to bear the burden of endless household chores, sometimes considering the time spent on them as a form of rest and leisure.

For Citation: Pushkareva, N.L. and I.V. Bogdashina. 2021. “Tasty and Healthy Food” in Everyday Women's Practices of a Non-Capital Soviet City in the 1950–1960s. Herald of Anthropology (Vestnik Antropologii) 1 (53): 260–274.

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