The way to a man's heart: gender roles, domestic ideology, and cookbooks in the 1950s

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1999 by Jessamyn Neuhaus

If a boy doesn't eat Wheaties, he won't grow up to be a major league ball player; if the young man doesn't keep regular he will miss out on promotions; he has to look out "after forty" and success will bring him at once more bathrooms and more ulcers.(53)

And where does the growing popularity for "ethnic" foods during the 1950s fit into the jellied, canned, processed ornamental home cookin' that seems have been ubiquitous in the postwar years?(54) Though the cuisine of the 1950s may seem to have been primarily Spam and casseroles, cookbooks actually told a more complicated story. They revealed postwar uncertainties, described by Levenstein as "growing doubts that the glittering new appliances and attractively packaged processed foods could really deliver on their promises of freedom."(55) In the recipes and rhetoric of postwar cookbooks, we can see how cooking became a cultural battleground and how American anxieties about gender roles fermented in the kitchen.

Ambivalent Authority: Postwar Cookbooks and Domestic Ideology

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

- Dr. Samuel Johnson, as quoted in The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook (1959)

As Patricia Storace writes "Every cookbook, more or less consciously, is a work of social history."(56) Yet historians have virtually ignored twentieth century cookbooks.(57) Cookbooks offer vivid examples of what we might appropriately term a cultural text: recipes are loaded with meaning particular to their time and place.(58) Lynne Ireland raises the question of how accurately cookbooks portray society in her article on compiled (or fund-raising) cookbooks. She asks "Do the facts presented in any way correspond to reality? Are cookbook compilers saying 'Here is what we eat' or 'Here is what we would have you believe that we eat'?"(59) The cookbooks discussed in this essay do both. They represent what women cooked, what cookbook authors and corporations believed women should cook and most importantly, why women should be cooking. I agree with Erika Endrijonas when she writes "While it may not be clear how individual cookbooks are actually utilized, the ideals they project reveal much about their historical and cultural context."(60)

The ideals projected by post-WWII cookbooks are not unique in their complexity and contradiction. Janet Theophano, for example, has argued that late nineteenth century "receipt books" offer historians evidence of the way women complied with the "cult of womanhood" while at the same time carving out spaces for creative expression within the pages of their cookery texts.(61) Moreover, post-WWII cookbooks were not the first prescriptive household texts that upheld domestic ideology and at the same time demonstrated an undercurrent of ambivalence about that ideal. Susan Strasser, for instance, has identified a strained effort in the rhetoric of Catherine Beecher to convince women that the drudgery of housework was an essential part of true womanhood.(62) But cookbooks published in the 1950s do contain uniquely eloquent expressions of anxieties particular to the post-WWII era. Humble describes how postwar cookbooks are especially helpful in illuminating white, middle-class 1950s society: