The Battle of the Land and the Kitchen Front: Twenty-First-Century Museum Representations of Second World War British Food Rationing and Gender Roles

abstract:This article examines how Britain's Imperial War Museum (IWM) acts as a pivotal location in which links between the popular memory of Second World War food rationing and gender roles are projected to the British public in twenty-first-century contexts. An analysis of the IWM's 2010–2011 "Ministry of Food" Exhibition and the 2013–2015 "Horrible Histories Rotten Rationing Big Picture Show" reveals that the multifaceted, gendered narratives present in the two representations of food rationing were not seamless histories. Rather, the article finds that factors of audiences' expectations and museum staff's thinking about wartime food and gender roles shaped the displays, which sometimes converged with and at other times diverged from wartime ideals and realities.