'Into every home, into every body': organicism and anti-statism in the British anti-fluoridation movement, 1952-1960

This article argues that the anti-fluoridation campaigns in the 1950s stemmed from concerns about both the increasing 'chemicalization' of food and the growing authority of the state over the private home and individual body. The British Housewives League (BHL), an organization typically thought insignificant after the late 1940s, was in fact at the centre of these campaigns. Steeped in the beliefs of inter-war and wartime organicism, the housewives believed that government intervention in food production and distribution was producing a post-war diet laden with harmful chemicals. The Ministry of Health's proposals to test water fluoridation in select communities in the early 1950s only further convinced the housewives that the state was harming the nation both physically and politically. More and more citizens would have no choice but to drink impure, potentially harmful water, they argued, and the burgeoning state would continue encroaching on private homes and bodies. While scholars have already demonstrated that what we now think of as 'leftist' environmental ideas were popular among 'rightist' movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the anti-fluoridation campaigns show that the BHL continued in the post-war years to intertwine our present-day notions of 'left' and 'right' ideologies.