WWII Ration Books
These small booklets, issued by the United States Office of Price Administration, were once the difference between a meal and going without. During World War II, families were issued ration books for sugar, coffee, butter, meat, canned goods, and shoes. When your stamps ran out, that was it. American women became remarkable navigators of this system.
Cookbooks and government pamphlets appeared offering workarounds, among them ration cookbooks like “Wartime Recipes for Cakes and Frostings”. It announces “No Eggs! No Sugar! No Shortening!” as though deprivation were simply a creative challenge.
My collage Wartime Recipes was built around this object. A vase of flowers assembled from cut paper sits on a table beside the book of Wartime Recipes. Above it hangs a framed wedding portrait of my grandparents, Helen and Peter, who married during the war years before he shipped out.
The figures in the portrait have no faces. This was a deliberate choice: the blank faces are meant to signal universality rather than biography. Helen and Peter stand in for every couple who posed for a photograph before a war. Their story was also my family’s story, but the collage is not really about them specifically. It is about all the women who waited, and all the men who left, and the strange suspended life that existed in between.
Peter came home. They eventually had my father. The ration books in my collection were saved the way people save things they cannot quite bring themselves to discard. It is a utilitarian paper that, once passed through the hands of women like my grandmother every week, carries a weight that plain paper simply does not.
