Did Feminism Kill Home Cooking?
Some critics have blamed feminism for the lack of home cooking today and the increased reliance on convenience food. (Isn’t it sad that feminism is blamed for so much and rarely given credit for what feminism helped women achieve.) Perhaps the most vocal of these was food writer Michael Pollan who wrote in a 2009 essay in the New York Times. He wrote that one of the reasons that women do not cook was that women went to work. In his New York Times essay, he also described Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystiqueas the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” Even without the book, women were questioning their roles in the home in the 1960’s. American housewives were reading Erma Bombeck who humorously mocked the unappreciated work of a homemaker and mother in her newspaper columns and books. (Here is her take on cooking like Julia Child.) Author and newspaper columnist Peg Bracken, known as a “cookbook rebel,” did the same for cooking in her 1960 book I Hate to Cook where she allowed to women to admit they might like see joy in cooking.
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| Erma Bombeck |
Pollan’s writing led to various responses from the feminist community and the conversation continued over the years. In 2013, Salon asked the question: “Is Michael Pollan a sexistpig?” In the other corner, the Huffington Post posted: “In Defense of MichaelPollan.” Regardless of the mediated answer, it is just another example of feminism being blamed for people no longer cooking. The truth about the relationship between food and feminism is more complicated and Friedan’s book is hardly at fault. It is more likely that the lack of knowledge about cooking can be traced back to taking home economics out of the schools and, in part, feminism is to blame in that area. When radical feminist Robin Morgan spoke to the national home economics organization in 1972, she is best remembered for referring to the women in the audience as the “enemy.” Yet, overall, she had a more nuanced message in her talk. She said: “Demand that if home economics is required for high school women, it should also be required for high school men. We must break down the notion and that child care and homemaking are gender jobs.”
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| Maggie Savoy |
Similarly, in 1970, Los Angeles Times women’s page editor Maggie Savoy wrote about how she explained women’s liberation to men: “If he said – and some still do – ‘Women’s place is in the home,’ I brighten. ‘It’s so wonderful we want to share it. Here’s my dishrag.” Feminists did not necessarily want to stop cooking; they just did not want to do all of the cooking. Bringing home economics back into the school curriculum is the way to increase home cooking.
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