The value of the good mother. Housewife occupation, food and health between women of popular classes

Abstract

The practices and discourses on healthy alimentation among working-class women can’t be analyzed as just an outcome of a hypothetical popular culture. Instead of analyzing practises taking cultures as point of departure, we take the opposite way: we analyze in first place the field of constrictions in which housewife’s job takes place as well as the transformations in it over the last years; in a second step, we analyze —taking into account this field of constrictions— the categories used to define a healthy alimentation. The tension between practices and schemes of healthy alimentation, as well as the tension between two models —a traditional and a modern one— of housewife allow us to understand the strategic uses, in the purpose of being defined as good mothers, of the categories of healthy alimentation.