ABSTRACT
Since the 1930s, biochemists and pharmacologists have defined cancer as a disease which can be experimentally produced through the use of radium, x-rays, ultraviolet light, and coal tar and its derivatives, notably azo dyes and aromatic hydrocarbons. A minor modification of the molecular structure of these compounds could influence their activity enormously. In the 1940s, two distinct substances, oestrogens as a biologically active drug and butter yellow as a food colourant, came under scientific scrutiny due to their presumed carcinogenic nature. While in Germany oestrogens, some of the most profitable biologics and of major importance for the new physiology of the gendered human body, were acquitted of the charge of having a cancer-causing steroidal structure, butter yellow, representative of the ills of industrial food production, was identified as a carcinogenic molecule. The history of oncologic theories of carcinogenic substances in the early twentieth century alone would be a worthwhile undertaking, but the history of oestrogens and butter yellow sheds new light on the holistic bias of the German women’s movement. The German women’s movement was, from the 1920s to well into the 1960s, in many regards a consumer movement concerned with defending the individual, the family and the collective body from contamination. The main question this essay seeks to answer is why German housewife organisations played such a crucial role in the prohibition of butter yellow in the 1940s but, at the same time, remained silent about oestrogens. Indeed, it was another thirty years before feminists engaged with the dangers of supposedly cancer-causing steroids in regard to hormonal therapy and the contraceptive pill. The history of chemically and biologically active agents cannot be written without consideration of the processes of their socialisation: discourses and narratives, modes of production, standardisation and regulation of procedures, problematisations and activations (Stoff 2013; Stoff 2012a, 7–24). In an important twist, the history of the German women’s movement in the twentieth century must also take these precarious substances into account.
