Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture

by Sherrie A. Inness

Who cooks dinner in American homes? It's no surprise that “Mom” remains the overwhelming answer. Cooking and all it entails, from grocery shopping to chopping vegetables to clearing the table, is to this day primarily a woman's responsibility. How this relationship between women and food developed through the twentieth century and why it has endured are the questions Sherrie Inness seeks to answer in Dinner American Women and Culinary Culture. By exploring a wide range of popular media from the first half of the twentieth century, including cookbooks, women's magazines, and advertisements, Dinner Roles sheds light on the network of sources that helped perpetuate the notion that cooking is women's work. Cookbooks and advertisements provided valuable information about the ideals that American society upheld. A woman who could prepare the perfect Jell-O mold, whip up a cake with her new electric mixer, and still maintain a spotless kitchen and a sunny disposition was the envy of other housewives across the nation. Inness begins her exploration not with women but with men-those individuals often missing from the kitchen who were taught their own set of culinary values. She continues with the study of juvenile cookbooks, which provided children with their first cooking lessons. Chapters on the rise of electronic appliances, ethnic foods, and the 1950s housewife all add to our greater understanding of women's evolving roles in American culinary culture.

Genres: Food History, Food, Nonfiction, Womens Studies

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Trilby O'Farrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good summary of recipe styles of 20th-century cookbooks, women's magazines, and advertising. Unfortunately I think Inness misses an important element of why women "chose" to stay in the kitchen. This is a problem I see in pop culture and pop feminism today as well: overlooking the context of what Inness sees as a stubborn reluctance to enter or remain in the paid workforce. If you were to understand that there was one job that was unavoidable if you were to have a family---homemaking---then working a second job on top of that would be quite a lot for most people. This "double shift" was a burden women in both communist and capitalist countries were eager to escape. More recently, people have woken up to the idea that men might do this work too, although mostly it is outsourced to lower class people who often happen to be women (working outside their own homes though, so it must be satisfying, I guess). Inness concludes that women were convinced to want to be homemakers through the power of propaganda that made housework and cooking seem fun, or a good choice, thereby underestimating women's intelligence. But she also details the exhausting war-time pressure on women to both work outside the home and be super-competent homemakers and then wonders why--in addition to the forces pushing them out of the workforce---they are not more eager to keep on working outside the home. As if they wouldn't be relieved to dump one job and have the second one made a little easier. It's the fallacy of "jobs are always satisfying and fulfilling while homemaking must always be less so." I have to disagree (and not because I think women ought to be homemakers, but because I question the idea that being in the workforce is inherently delightful). I mean, these historians imagine that women must have missed the factory as much as they would miss being a professor or an author.

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The unpacking of how gendered food preferences are constructed is fascinating, but it got very repetitive & sometimes self-contradictory.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a funny but sincere analysis of women and men and their relationship to cooking and food culture in mid-20th century America. The author predominantly utilizes cookbooks from the era to illustrate how cooking lessons also served as gender lessons in proper American womanhood and manhood. I most enjoyed the chapter on the ideal 1950s housewife, who, (according to women’s magazines and
cookbooks) rejoiced in the convenience of “space-age” technologies such as canned and prepared foods that could be readily picked up at the grocery store for the first time. The recipes depicted from this decade come across as nauseating at best...they all seemed to involve marshmallow cream, pineapple chunks, cream of mushroom soup, jello, evaporated milk, shredded coconut, and cans of fried onions or shoestring potatoes. (This was the height of the casserole, which was simple and streamlined, but also offered women an opportunity for creativity in the kitchen). The author notes how many magazines (and their advertisers) encouraged women to challenge themselves to compose dinners completely made from new canned products.

Chapters also cover gendered relationships to cooking gadgets; the dainty cooking movement of the early 20th century, which assured that reform-minded women could still be proper ladies; the rise of International and ethnic cooking in the 1920s and 30s; women's roles as budget-conscious shoppers and household managers during the Depression; and the disruptions brought to the dinner table by WWII. This book has definitely given me an interest in the growing area of food history studies.

[Allisonv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sherrie Inness' stuff is essential to understanding what is in your fridge right now and why.