Our NCA Talk: Regional Cookery
Today, Lance & I are giving a talk at the NCA Pre-conference: Our Place at the Table: Continuing the Conversation and Deepening the Connections between Food and Communication.
Our paper is “Regional Cookery: The Relationship Between Newspaper Food Editors & Home Cooks Spanning the Public & Private Spheres.”
It is an examination of newspaper cookbooks from the 1940s through the 1970s. It builds on the scholarship of some scholars who have found that the act of producing the cooking publication were more feminist than originally thought. For example, a study of the “Lutheran Church Women” in Iowa found distinct feminist actions. The scholar noted the activity of gathering information and producing a cookbook. She noted of the women:
“They entered the economic sphere both to produce and to sell their cookbooks, and they negotiated and developed a corporate process that gave them an important voice in the community. Of course, they did so in the service of a domestic ideology that feminism opposed, but their methods were closer to those of contemporary feminists than either side was then likely to admit: a politics of celebrating women getting together, creating collectively, valuing women and women’s work.”
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