Can she bake a cherry pie? American women and the kitchen in the twentieth century

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century MARY DRAKE MCFEELY, (2000)

Amherst University of Massachusetts Press

Reviewed by: VIRGINIA RICHARDS, Ed.D., CFCS

Assistant Professor, Georgia Southern University

I am ambivalent about Mary Drake McFeely's Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century. It is, at the same time, a delightful journey based on the types of cook-- books published during each decade, and a puzzling misconception about the influence of home economics on cooking modes. These mistaken assumptions about home economics are surprising in an otherwise meticulously researched and exquisitely written book.

OVERVIEW Ms. McFeely proposes that the kitchen and the chore of feeding families has been used throughout history as a way of suppressing women, but that women have countered by using the kitchen as a way of expressing creativity and control over their daily lives. The book begins with a verbal snapshot of Napton, Missouri, in 1928, found in The Napton Memorial Church Cook Book. The recipes and advice given in this cookbook reflect a hard but meaningful farm life in which a woman's cooking expertise was passed down from her female forebearers. These farmwomen viewed the cooking and preserving of the food produced by their men as an essential part of the total work of the family. Ms. McFeely contrasts the typical farm woman with intellectually elite women in the late Nineteenth Century who sought to free women from the drudgery of daily kitchen work by bringing families together to live in...