Kitchen Culture in America

by Inness, Sherrie A.

• ISBN13: 9780812217353
• ISBN10: 0812217357
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-26
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

At supermarkets across the nation, customers waiting in line--mostly female--flip through magazines displayed at the checkout stand. What we find on those magazine racks are countless images of food and, in particular, women: moms preparing lunch for the team, college roommates baking together, working women whipping up a meal in under an hour, dieters happy to find a lowfat ice cream that tastes great. In everything from billboards and product packaging to cooking shows, movies, and even sex guides, food has a presence that conveys powerful gender-coded messages that shape our society. Kitchen Culture in America is a collection of essays that examine how women's roles have been shaped by the principles and practice of consuming and preparing food. Exploring popular representations of food and gender in American society from 1895 to 1970, these essays argue that kitchen culture accomplishes more than just passing down cooking skills and well-loved recipes from generation to generation. Kitchen culture instructs women about how to behave like "correctly" gendered beings. One chapter reveals how juvenile cookbooks, a popular genre for over a century, have taught boys and girls not only the basics of cooking, but also the fine distinctions between their expected roles as grown men and women. Several essays illuminate the ways in which food manufacturers have used gender imagery to define women first and foremost as consumers. Other essays, informed by current debates in the field of material culture, investigate how certain commodities like candy, which in the early twentieth century was advertised primarily as a feminine pleasure, have been culturally constructed. The book also takes a look at the complex relationships among food, gender, class, and race or ethnicity-as represented, for example, in the popular Southern black Mammy figure. In all of the essays, Kitchen Culture in America seeks to show how food serves as a marker of identity in American society.

Author Biography

Sherrie A. Inness is Distinguished Laura C. Harris Chair of Women's Studies at Denison University. She is the author of Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life; and Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women's College Fiction, 1895-1910.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking Food/Thinking Gender	1	(12)
Sherrie A. Inness
Bonbons, Lemon Drops, and Oh Henry! Bars: Candy, Consumer Culture, and the Construction of Gender, 1895-1920	13	(38)
Jane Dusselier
Campbell's Soup and the Long Shelf Life of Traditional Gender Roles	51	(18)
Katherine Parkin
``Now Then---Who Said Biscuits?'' The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905-1953	69	(26)
Alice A. Deck
The Joy of Sex Instruction: Women and Cooking in Marital Sex Manuals, 1920-1963	95	(24)
Jessamyn Neuhaus
``The Enchantment of Mixing-Spoons'': Cooking Lessons for Girls and Boys	119	(20)
Sherrie A. Inness
Home Cooking: Boston Baked Beans and Sizzling Rice Soup as Recipes for Pride and Prejudice	139	(18)
Janet Theophano
Processed Foods from Scratch: Cooking for a Family in the 1950s	157	(18)
Erika Endrijonas
Freeze Frames: Frozen Foods and Memories of the Postwar American Family	175	(36)
Christopher Holmes Smith
She Also Cooks: Gender, Domesticity, and Public Life in Oakland, California, 1957-1959	211	(16)
Jessica Weiss
``My Kitchen Was the World'': Vertamae Smart Grosvenor's Geechee Diaspora	227	(24)
Doris Witt
``If I Were a Voodoo Priestess'': Women's Culinary Autobiographies	251	(20)
Traci Marie Kelly
List of Contributors	271	(4)
Index	275	(10)
Acknowledgments	285