Red Emma’s

In 1972, a restaurant called Mother Courage opened in New York—followed by more than 230 feminist cafes, coffeehouses, and restaurants across the United States over the next fifty years. INGREDIENTS FOR REVOLUTION collects their stories for the first time, showcasing the vital role these institutions played in the fight for women’s liberation, LGBTQ equality, and food justice. Alex D. Ketchum surveys these businesses’ various financial models and dives into broader issues of labor, food sourcing, and cultural programming to understand how these women yoked feminist and capitalist commitments toward a more equitable marketplace. Brimming with archival research, interviews, and photographs, INGREDIENTS FOR REVOLUTION is a fundamental work of women’s, food, and cultural history.

Since 2018, Dr. Alex Ketchum has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, environmental, technological, and gender history.Ketchum's first peer-reviewed book, ENGAGE IN PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP! (Concordia University Press, 2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible.Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ketchum's second book, INGREDIENTS FOR REVOLUTION, is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. Ketchum's interest in past imaginings of utopia through business creation and the implementation of communications technologies has guided her new research and third book project on historically contextualizing the relationship between feminist ethics and AI. You can find out more about her other writings, podcasts, zines, exhibitions, and more at https://www.alexketchum.ca.