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Abstract

Women’s involvement in Vancouver milk politics can be examined through media representations of gender and maternalism, particularly through the ways that women’s media visibility shifted during the early- to mid-20th century. To understand this shift, this thesis will address three core themes related to milk politics: gender in the media, domestic maternalism, and women’s consumer activism. By examining these themes, this thesis argues that media representations of women’s participation in milk politics changed from passive recipients of prescriptive media and men’s expertise into active participants of public political milk discourse and activism due to changing social perceptions of gendered roles in the postwar period. Examining media representations of women and milk reveals that gender played a distinct role in shaping how women’s public authority and autonomy was perceived; specifically, women’s expected roles as maternal domestics informed how the media positioned women in public conversations about milk. Utilizing milk as lens for examining gender and women’s activism in the media therefore deepens our understandings of gender and woman’s political contributions in Vancouver in the early- to mid-20th century.