| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Wendy A. Woloson. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionary, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America. (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 20th series, number 1.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 277. $44.95.
Wendy A. Woloson has produced a thoroughly researched, exceptionally well-written, and very accessible account of the incorporation and transformation of sugar within American food and foodways in the nineteenth century. She argues convincingly that sugar emerged first as an emblem of masculine power through the European conquest of land, crops, and people. Until the late eighteenth century, its utilitarian associations as a powerful medicine, preservative, and drug coexisted with highly ceremonial displays of ornamental sculpture—all testaments to Western male power. Its progressive democratization, ubiquitous consumption by all social classes, and ultimate association with largely feminine spheres of cultural consumption and social relations transformed sugar from a public masculine good into a domestic feminine product. This domestication explains the enduring ambivalence and contradictory associations with which sugar continues to be burdened, a point well illustrated in Woloson's masterful postscript.	1
One of the author's main accomplishments is to link the burgeoning, even insatiable appetite for sweets to a shifting political economy marked by expanding industrialization that engendered both a sharp divide between public and private spheres and a gendered division of labor at home and at work. Woloson weaves important nineteenth-century changes into her narrative, including increased class differentiation, prevailing ideologies of motherhood and femininity, new scientific knowledge on nutrition and addiction, and dramatic technological advances in manufacturing and in advertising that made sweets more available and more desirable but also morally suspect for "weak" consumers such as women and children.	. . .

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