All the Women Who Have Cooked Before

During our pre-Thanksgiving dinner prep, I had a flashback to an unnamed angry woman of the past, yelling at her partner or children about how she had "slaved over a hot stove" all day for them. To be clear - I didn't feel I was slaving at all, which was precisely the point. My appreciation for cooking has a direct relationship with the amount I cook, and these days each are tangibly ascending. For better or worse, the fact that cooking was stereotypically "woman's work" is never far from my mind, however.

At some unknowable point in the past, I - and many young, education women like me and around me - decided that victorian 1950s-era notions of "traditional" femininity were not for us. We would not be the chained to the kitchen ball-and-chain, a passive No. 2 in the relationship and family hierarchy, a glorified maid with a Mrs. to denote our status. These narrow female roles had perhaps already lapsed enough by our mothers' generation to make them seem implausible in their extreme forms; society had evolved at least a bit beyond the laughable "women's brains are half the size of men's" concept of a woman's role. 

But still, a New York Times article from 1988 entitled "Women: Out of the House But Not Out of the Kitchen"  sheds light on one remnant of the past many young women today grew up with -- seeing Mom in the kitchen and tagging along with her to the grocery store. According to the Times 90 percent of married women surveyed for the piece did all the shopping and cooking in their households.  A marketing consultant quoted in the story said that cooking ''is still considered a woman's role, and women are accepting it more.'' 

"Hell no! Not me!" most independent, strong women in their twenties or thirties would say, and I'd be among them. However, recently I have been reflecting on my own time in the kitchen and relationship with cooking. 

In our apartment, the three of us cook together pretty much all the time. Two of us are women, all of us are from Vassar, and as such, even the odd man out has an overcharged sensibility for the heteronormative. We are hypersensitive to gender roles--seriously, but also with a sense of humor and often deserved self-derision. When Sam took the lead on ordering the Turkey, I asked him if he was going to be in charge of it. "Only if we're going to go by prescribed gender roles," he replied with characteristic dry sarcasm. When for a moment all the women at the party were chopping and sauteeing in the kitchen while the men flipped from "Mythbusters" to football, we called out "Well isn't this typical?" and "My heteronormative alarm is going off." 

It wouldn't be funny at all, except for the fact that it is not at all typical for us anymore - or if it were typical, it would not be considered in any way acceptable. We wouldn't be able to brush it off by saying "I did it because that was what my generation did," like a housewife in the Times story, now 20-years ago. 

Of course, we're talking about a setting now where all of us are single, close, friends. I'm not entirely sure what married couples my age and older are experiencing in terms of the division of household duties and kitchen responsibilities, but I'm hoping it's something Betty Friedan wouldn't recognize. My gut reaction to the question "Will I be the one doing all the cooking?" is "Absolutely not." But... 

There's a but. But I love to cook. Nothing is more satisfying than making a meal to share with loved ones, or trying something new with interesting ingredients to great success. While sometimes I'm happy to make a sandwich, most times cooking provides a mindless respite from the data, reading, and rapid-fire communication obligations of the work day. It's sensory in a way that the work day seldom is: touch, see, smell, taste.

Then again, cooking is, in my experience so far, best done when 1. you're doing it with another person to help or talk to and 2. you aren't being forced to the stove by obligation. The latter circumstantial advisory keys into the beauty of changing roles: freedom to choose. 

We battle daily with a feeling of wariness about tradition and dated concepts of feminity. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning and organization are always tinged by the "woman's work" concept for me, and if I'm doing them and someone else is not, it is cause for introspection. The same thing is true of other stereotypically "female" things that we have long sought to shrug off and forever evade. The fear of being considered emotional or hysterical pre-feminist females gives way to a reticence to have any sort of "Defining the Relationship" talk, or openly expressing strong feelings at work.  Caution is a good thing, though, and sure beats the alternative-- blind oblivious obligation. 

The words "because I should," hold no currency anymore. Taking their place are the words "because I want to."