Gender and 1950s

Neuhaus, Jessamyn. “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s.” Journal of Social History 32:3 (Spring, 1999), 529-555.

In “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s”, Jessamyn Neuhaus claims that 1950s cookbooks, which appear to be reinforcing gender norms, actually reveal more skepticism and resistance to this ideal in the larger post-World War 2 society (531). Neuhaus starts by looking at how cookbooks reinforce gender norms by gendering cooking methods and styles. She continues by exploring the shift of rhetoric with regards to the time and effort of cooking and the conflict it exposes, and ends by arguing that the forceful repetition of domestic ideals exposes what theorist Homi K. Bhabha has called a “Third Space” (p.546) that reveals the repetition of authority makes it unstable. The author’s purpose is to examine how cookbooks from the 1950s were written to reinforce rigid domestic and gender role ideology, but in actuality, those ideals were being challenged and resisted by society. The article was published in The Journal of Social History and the author is addressing scholars interested in the history of expression of gender roles.

According to Neuhaus, Cookbook-related publishing in the 1950s exposed the cracks in the domestic ideal ideology, both directly and indirectly. With a closer look, one can see that many cookbooks directly contradicted their own message about a woman’s role. Both advertising and cookbooks in the 1950s recognized that cooking was a boring and unpleasant task that women were held up to (544). New kitchen gadgets and processed food also freed women from the kitchen. Cookbooks themselves even acknowledged a woman’s busy schedule, offering quick and simple recipes (543). While processed foods were meant to make things quicker, women were expected to be creative with their cooking. This required more work on food that was supposed convenient in the first place. The struggle between convenience and the domestic ideal has an interesting relationship with the postwar push on women to go back to the home, after the workforce had no more need of them. Processed foods freed the woman from the kitchen but the expectation of creative cooking styles brought her back to the kitchen. This expectation was unnaturally forced upon women, which, in the long run, repelled women from the kitchen.

The idea that a man should be barbecuing while the woman prepares a jell-o salad was the work of the post-war era publishing (542).  Men were only associated with food preparation in cookbooks while preparing so-called “masculine” meals, including steak and hamburgers.  Many reiterated the notion that the only way for a man to love a woman was if she could cook him the meals he wanted every night.

So the question becomes: why have this separation of cooking in the kitchen and barbecuing?  On top of that, if this is the natural preferences of men and women, why do so many cookbooks have to make that observation?  There is nothing about humans’ physiological abilities that makes cooking or barbecuing better suited to one gender or the other.  The author mentions how some sources put an emphasis on men taking on the responsibility of cooking meat.  Not that the women couldn’t, or that men couldn’t do the kitchen work as well; the tasks men do, can definitely be performed by women, and vice versa.

During the war, many jobs in factories and workshops were filled by women.  However, society realized that there would have been a reluctance for women to return to the home after the war, back to simply cooking and cleaning.  Cooking was a much more tedious job compared to the others that were available.  This led to trying to make it appear fun and interesting, and ultimately to new advertising techniques to lessen the dullness.  Nauhaus discussed a cookbook that hinted that it was targeting working women (544), and photos of housewives, with over-enthusiastic grins standing over an oven, are prime examples of this forced domestic ideal.  Very few cookbooks suggested otherwise (545).

Via publishing, information and ideas are distributed to, and consumed by, wide varieties of people. The ideas are integrated into the cultural consciousness, even if they are artificially constructed and represent concepts in a way that provides the possibility that they are not natural.  The author is examining a very small aspect of this influence; in this particular case, she examines how cookbooks influenced gender, social, and domestic norms and ideals. She argues that this reinforcement and repetition of gender ideals “articulated general fears and anxieties about those norms” (547) and opened the door to the idea that such ideals are not naturally occurring.  To back up her argument, she refers to theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of the “Third Space” where the notion of authority repetition will disrupt that authority. This authoritative voice indirectly shows the cracks of the domestic ideal by exposing that voice of authority and its need to be recognized and validated by the woman (547). The gendering of cooking continues to this day.

The explicit association of men with the cooking of meat is a gender norm that came out of the 1950s. One of the most popular series on video-sharing site YouTube is Epic Meal Time. Epic Meal Time is, in some sense, a cooking show targeted at men. They have even had, as a special guest, none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it is presented in a comedic manner, it still reflects contemporary societal domestic ideals. Most of the food cooked on the show follows the 1950s ideal of “manly’ cooking, utilizing meat and alcohol. Many of their recipes use nutritionally gross quantities of meat, in making foods that themselves come in, well, epic quantities. While not all recipes fit the 1950s sense of manliness through the inclusion of baking and vegetables, they are still presented in a manly way.

The overall design of their website uses a wood texture reminiscent of grilling planks or a cutting board as their background. Their logo is a play on the skull and crossbones; their skull is wearing a saucepan as a helmet and the crossbones have been replaced with crossed chef’s knives. All of these stereotypical “manly” images together serve to create a caricature of masculinity and cooking. The emphasis, which they even capitalize upon through their merchandise, on bacon and Jack Daniel’s unintentionally denaturalizes masculinity and makes it something to laugh at. This is, however, more overt than the denaturalization of gender created by 1950s cookbooks, but the function is still the same.

Epic Meal Time is a contemporary example of how new media technology has affected how information is dispensed to the public, and specifically how (gendered) cooking ideals are integrated into our cultural consciousness.