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By admin

Carolyn Raihala

HIS245 – Dr. Shrout

10 April 2015

Entering the Public Sphere through Cookbooks

To be published is to been made visible. This is not a subjugating visibility, such as a visibility in which the subject is rendered vulnerable, but a visibility in which the subject brings himself into the public sphere and participates in the conversation therein. Historians have extensively researched the ways in which subjugated classes of people have brought themselves into the public sphere. For example, after analyzing letters, pamphlets and speeches published by disenfranchised free blacks in the antebellum North, historian Richard Newman observed that print could allow “future generations a view of a neglected history” (in this case, that of free African Americans). In addition, because of the public nature of print and its position of high esteem in American culture, there was room for an otherwise silenced people to spread their views.[1]

The study of using print for one’s own liberation can be extended to the world of antebellum American women; their relationship with print shared similarities with that of free black Americans of their time. Historian Janet Theophano wrote that although women were discouraged from publication, many of them did. However, she noted, “publishing cookbooks may have been an exception.” In other words, the publication of cookbooks was the one acceptable form of media for women to publish. Therefore, contemporary historians looked to other documents that broke these rules, particularly works of fiction and poetry, in their investigations of gender politics in the antebellum period. However, a small group of researchers delved into the history of cookbooks, both published and private, in order to answer the question of how women in antebellum America may have appropriated this socially accepted channel of media to subvert their relegation to the private sphere and to record their side of history.

In Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Scholar Janet Theophano claimed that by creating cookbooks, women could both “write themselves into being” and thereby make themselves visible, and voice concerns about political and social issues. By concealing advocacy for women’s social mobility with socially acceptable rhetoric, the cookbook writer was able to publish her controversial opinions. For example, in discussing “American Cookery” (the original American cookbook), Theophano noted that the author’s disdainful description of the fickleness of women’s fashion “may be seen as an opportunity to highlight the debate about the fledgling nation’s competing values for women.”[2] Furthermore, Theophano argued that writers of cookbooks, regardless of their advocacy for social reform, could achieve fame and influence over a wide readership, thus placing them in the public sphere.

Andrea K. Newlyn argued in “Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Cookbooks” that the writing in cookbooks and domestic how-to manuals (an offshoot from the cookbook genre) suggests the breakdown of the barrier between the male public sphere and the female private sphere. She wrote that according to these cookbooks, “women’s influence within the private domain extends beyond the boundaries of their supposedly ‘separate’ sphere to reform not only the individual home and family, but the larger community.”[3] The women writers did this by casting themselves in narratives as protagonists with the power to transform the chaos of a messy, disorganized home–and by implication, the nation–into an efficient, smoothly run machine. Newlyn also pointed to the inclusion of information about traditionally male topics, such as architecture, engineering, and science in the domestic how-to manual American Woman’s Home, as evidence that the “conceptual categories of gendered spheres… that supposedly structured nineteenth-century American society” were unstable.[4]

Unlike Newlyn and Theophano, other historians have studied the same cookbooks, only to have concluded that they contain evidence for the societal expectations for women. In “Early American Cookbooks as Cultural Artifacts,” historian Steven Tobias examined the books in order to trace the socio-historical transformations throughout the America’s history. Despite the broad sweep of this undertaking, he narrowed in on the antebellum time frame, claiming, “cookbooks reflected the clear socio-economic divide that was opening between the sexes in the eighteenth century.” Instead of analyzing the writing in the cookbooks, Tobias discussed the movement of cookbooks into the public sphere via publishing. Since “the criteria for establishing the domestic norm was increasingly becoming a function of the public sphere,” and cookbooks instructed housewives on establishing that norm, cookbooks grew in popularity.[5]

Other in-depth, book-length analysis of the relationship between cookbooks and gender focused primarily on the post-Civil War era of American history. In Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking : Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America, historian Jessamyn Neuhaus briefly touched on the antebellum period. She spoke of the influence of “prescriptive domestic literature” (like cookbooks) in emphasizing women’s work in the home. However, she dug deeper and mentions an argument like Newlyn’s: that the authors of the cookbooks did hold the “woman’s sphere” to be important because of its influences on the productivity and stability of the market economy.[6] However, this is the extent of Neuhaus’s discussion of the burgeoning cookbook publication in the early 1800’s, and the rest of the book focuses on the portrayal of gender roles in cookbooks after the Civil War.

Despite a the dearth of research that investigated how women used cookbooks in the antebellum era, the existing literature argued that, like free black Americans of the same time period, housewives used print to spread controversial sociopolitical messages to a wide readership, and achieve positions of influence through publication. When investigating the written work of the cookbooks, Newlyn identifies evidence of the breakdown between the private, female social sphere and the public, male social sphere.

[1] Newman, Richard. “Protest in Black and White The Formation and Transformation of an African American Political Community during the Early Republic.” In Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, 181. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

[2] Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave, 2002. 234.

[3] Newlyn, Janet. “Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Cookbooks” p. 37

[4] Ibid.

[5] Tobias, Steven M. “Early American Cookbooks as Cultural Artifacts.” Papers On Language & Literature 34, no. 1 (Winter98 1998): 3. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed April 10, 2015).

[6] Neuhaus, Jessamyn. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 16.