ABSTRACT
In May 1939, a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune warned that a 'Communist front' group called the League of Women Shoppers (LWS) was threatening to boycott the products of employers who did not comply with the National Labor Relations Act. Federal employees with associations to the consumer movement became prominent among the victims of the post-war Red Scare. An alliance of organized labor, consumers, and sympathetic policymakers challenged business prerogatives during the New Deal and World War II years, working through agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The anti-Communist attack on the New Deal sometimes understood as triggered by the rise of mass production unionism under the CIO was a reaction against the emergence of a pro-labor, anti-racist and feminist consumer movement. The consumer movement attracted the most prominent left and liberal women of the day, as well as thousands of less famous ones.
