In the 1950s, little girls may have been called "sugar and spice," but their mothers wanted to be known as modern saccharin consumers, says UC Davis American studies scholar Carolyn de la Peña.

In her research on the cultural roots of American food habits, de la Pena has found that the affair with saccharin did not begin only through fear of fat, but because it was also symbolic of women's budding independence after World War II.

In fact, female consumers have been leading the way in culturally defining "what is sweet" through their preference for artificial sweeteners over the past half century, according to de la Peña.

"During the '50s, sugar was associated with labor -- it was regarded as an important food, one that provided the easiest way to get energy," she says. "It was the woman's job to put that sugar energy into her family."

During the same era, after baking cakes and cookies for husbands and kids, many women began to choose saccharin to sweeten their drinks, de la Peña says. Small saccharin containers were frequently given as hostess gifts from one woman to another and used during dinner parties and afternoon teas when women made time for themselves.

Cultural attitudes toward artificial sweeteners shifted dramatically over the century. Saccharin was invented in the 1890s as a derivative of coal tar and was used by diabetics during the first half of the 20th century. At the time, Americans were suspicious of these new artificial ingredients, partly because they believed manufacturers using them were trying to create adulterated products, de la Peña says.

But the suspicions turned to endorsements after World War II, when sugar shortages introduced American cooks to artificial sweeteners. By the 1950s, before the development of diet drinks and a middle-class preoccupation with weight control, women began to prefer saccharin to sugar in social contexts, in spite of its reputation as an "adulterant" and a product of the chemist's lab.

"Saccharin provided women with a way to distinguish themselves as modern," de la Peña says. "Instead of using old-fashioned sugar, they could offer guests tiny, fizzing pills that combined the appearance of scientific progress with the comforts of domestic life."

Using this new product of science, one with no calories, and therefore quite different from the energy-buildling capacity of sugar, may have allowed women to transform the meaning of sweetness. Instead of associating sweetness with the work of fueling others, women transformed the concept to being about self-focus and physical control.

"Using saccharin wasn't about serving others, but about serving yourself and controlling your body," she says. "It was also about a new role for sugar, considering that saccharin has a little bitter, metallic taste, women began preferring that taste because is was not perfectly sweet, but grown-up sweet with a little edge."

Author of "The Body Electric" (2003), de la Peña connects today's cultural attitudes toward food with her investigations into the 20th century belief that technology renews energy in the human body. Her next book, due in 2007 and tentatively titled "Tasting Technology," looks at how Americans have eaten their way to new attitudes about energy and consumption over the last 50 years.