This chapter examines how Austrian patriotic culture came to pervade the city’s streets. It demonstrates that an Austrian mobilization did take place in the Bohemian lands and addresses the larger question of the wartime relationship between state and civil society in the Habsburg Empire. The patriotic discourse was not just imposed from above, it was also abundantly relayed by private associations and among the public through denunciations and public collections. The wartime patriotic culture became part of the urban landscape through the display of flags, processions in the streets, and the ban on pan-Slavic colors. Prague’s inhabitants contributed to collections for soldiers or widows and orphans, and were constantly expected to join in the common sacrifice. Volunteers raising money as well as ubiquitous posters urging them to give more for war victims were constant reminders of a conflict that became inescapable in everyday life.

Grandmothers were household managers. They assigned household duties to their daughters, daughters-in-law and, in wealthier households, servants. They supervised food prepartion for daily meals, and for storerooms. They directed the handcraft work that made households self-sufficient in clothing, bedding and shoes, and taught the younger women handcraft skills. In many parts of China handcrafted goods were produced in the home for the market, including for export. The sales brought in income for the family.

Grandmothers marshalled the preparations for family festivals, notably marriages, and for the many festivals that punctuated the year, most importantly the New Year, which demanded the attendance of the whole family. Grandmothers supervised the preparation of food, clothing and ritual items, for an occasion that cemented the family together. Family celebrations went into abeyance from 1937, through twelve years of war and during the Mao Era. They are now back in full force. Hundreds of millions go home in the run-up to the New Year. For labour migrants the two-week holiday is the only time they spend at home with their children.

Chapter 1 examines the tensions that erupted in the 1830s and 1840s in reaction to the Poor Law Commission’s ban on serving festive meals of roast beef and plum pudding to workhouse inmates. It demonstrates that, despite the new drive to centralize relief policies in the 1830s, local authorities frequently overrode and undermined directives that interfered with their right to dispense aid in traditional ways that they felt enhanced social stability. This chapter explores the symbolic meaning of roast beef to the institutionalized poor, the Boards of Guardians that superintended them, and the communities in which they were imbedded. It argues that a study of when and why paupers were and were not furnished with what was often termed “Old English Fare” in the early years of the New Poor Law reveals that the transition from moral economy to political economy was far from complete. The tensions that erupted amongst local and central government officials, paupers, and communities in reaction to the Poor Law Commission’s attempt to ban these meals suggests that debates over food were part of much broader negotiations about both the role of the modern state and the place of the poor within local and national communities.