These 1930s Housewives Were the Godmothers of Radical Consumer Activism
When meat prices spiked during the Great Depression, the women of Detroit got mad as hell—and launched a boycott that changed America.
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The women were fearless, but the meatmen called them communists.
On the afternoon of July 27, 1935, the sounds of protest filled the Hamtramck, Michigan, shopping district, as a troop of 500 housewives descended on Joseph Campau Avenue with banners and picket signs reading: “Strike Against High Meat Prices. Don’t Buy.”
It was six years into the Great Depression, and the women, many of whom came from working-class immigrant families, were demanding a 20 percent reduction in meat prices from the city’s meat-packers and butcher shops. The picket was the first in a summerlong boycott that eventually spread out of the city’s 2.09 square miles and into neighboring Detroit. It was led by a 32-year-old, 100-pound, first-generation Polish-American named Mary Zuk.
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