ABSTRACT
From the earliest days of confrontation and long past the final surrender, the Kitchen Frontso named by Lord Woolton, who headed up Britain's Ministry of Foodwas one of the government's most important battlefronts during World War II. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska reports, "Austerity altered culinary traditions and the kitchen front was central to propaganda on the home front. Sustained by a uniform propaganda message, housewives co-operated in the war effort and wartime food policy was generally popular". Along with the domestic agenda of women's culture and the move toward normalization, once more, of the home as woman's sphere, came a retreat from avenues of female agency that ran concurrently with female sexuality. Embodied agency, "worldly" agency, is not the sanctioned agency of the domesticated, unworldly subject whose sensuality is acceptable only when it enhances her aesthetic sensibilities or her culinary prowess.
