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Eating Together: The Sexual Politics of the School Lunchroom, 1890–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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The Cover illustration for the May 1916 issue of the American School Board Journal presents a scene that could have taken place at most of the hundreds of high school lunchrooms recently established in the nation's larger cities. In the drawing, two well-dressed young men glance upward from their seats at a shy but fetching young woman. As she moves past them, carrying a tray of food, she returns their look.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

NOTES

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There is a large primary literature on the school lunchroom as a site for instruction in manners and etiquette. See Cox, Claire L., “How the School Cafeteria Can Help in Educating Pupils,” Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals 29 (05 1945): 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sloane, Winifred E., “Cafeteria Teaches, Too,” Nation's Schools 24 (08 1939): 6061Google Scholar; Cafeteria Courtesies: A Guide to Good Manners in the School Lunchroom” (booklet), reproduced in Nation's Schools 38 (11 1946): 2024Google Scholar; Schroder, Allene Moseley, “Cafeteria Builds Better Citizens,” Nation's Schools 20 (08 1937): 5759Google Scholar; and Painter, Sara A., “Educational Discipline,” Practical Home Economics 19 (11 1941): 389–90Google Scholar.

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The cinema provides a rich vein of food/sex imagery. See, for example, a scene from Die Hard (1988), featuring female and male perspectives on food, sex, and Christmas cheer (Parshall, Peter F., “Die Hard and the American Mythos,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 18 [Winter 1991]: 134–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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Freud, Sigmund argues that knowledge of the function of primitive taboos can help modern societies understand the obsessive prohibitions of neurotics (Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. Strachey, James [1912, 1913; rept. New York: W. W Norton, 1950], 26Google Scholar).

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32. Ellis, and Abarbanel, , Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, 147 (Berry)Google Scholar; and Farb, and Armelagos, , Consuming Passions, 87Google Scholar. For a recent confirmation of the view that food, eating, and sex are inseparably linked, see Meadow, Rosalyn M. and Weiss, Lillie, Women's Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality: The Relationship Between Food and Sex (New York: Haworth, 1992)Google Scholar.

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38. Hall, G. Stanley, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton, 1923), 421Google Scholar. Hall's perception was at least partially based on studies linking fasting and starvation with similar mechanisms for sex.

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63. Shapiro, , Perfection Salad, 159Google Scholar. On Taylor and scientific management, see Nelson, Daniel, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 5578Google Scholar; and Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, published in Monthly Review 26 (0708 1974), 1247Google Scholar. On women's role in educational reform in this period, see Reese, , Power and the Promise, 3033, 42Google Scholar; and Frankel, Noralee and Dye, Nancy S., eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991)Google Scholar, especially Susan Tank Lesser's bibliographical essay.

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67. On play and recreation, see Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 102–3Google Scholar; and Cross, Gary, A Social History of Leisure Since 1600 (State College, Pa.: Venture, 1990), 172–73Google Scholar.

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70. Shapiro, , Perfection Salad, 37 (“feminine domain”), 67Google Scholar. On Progressive Era careerism, see also Richard, Hofstader's analysis of the “status revolution” in The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955), 131–73Google Scholar. On possible links between nutrition, slimness, and achievement, see Meadow, and Weiss, , Women's Conflicts, 10Google Scholar.

71. This conclusion is obviously speculative. Based on Bates's suggestion that perverse eating shares with perverse sexuality the desire for pleasure and the disregard for need, one might make the case that the nutrition and school lunch movements were mechanisms of repression (Bates, , Gluttons and Libertines, 2425Google Scholar). Perhaps both are true, in that certain elements of feminism found repression useful and congenial. On the similarities between the sex and eating drives, see Meadow, and Weiss, , Women's Conflicts, 104Google Scholar.