Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago

In the years between the end of the Civil War and the repeal of the 18th Amendment, Chicago became "a city of restaurants," as a 1901 Tribune article put it. However, there was a murky legal and cultural line between the saloon/tavern and the restaurant that made lawmakers and citizens alike unsure about how to firmly define a restaurant and set out guidelines for who could patronize and work in them and under what conditions. In this talk, Alana Toulin will consider restaurants as contentious sites of labor and state building where larger debates about gender, class, race, public health, and governance were carried out.