Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity

Women's (community) Cookbooks

Women's cookbooks were a source of connection, solidarity, and community value for women, particularly in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century. Although the idea of cookbooks may seem trivial and simple to a naked eye, cookbooks like the Women's Recipe Book are historically significant and valuable treasures. These cookbooks were not only a way for women to connect with one another on a communal level, but also to connect the members of the women's Suffrage community to one another, provide opportunities to share traditions and home remedies, and keep their communities cohesive and stable. 

Interestingly enough, women's community cookbooks actually presented some of the most radical ideas of the suffrage movement, despite their reputation of being conservative markers of gender roles and domestic traditions. The cookbooks expanded frameworks of femininity and community for suffragists and carried messages of determination and necessity for female enfranchisement and actually popularized the more "radical" ideas and theories of female enfranchisement and advancement in society. Works like the Women's Recipe Book represent the transition from old to new, traditionalism to modernism, and complacency to resistance. Women's community cookbooks are an incredibly significant exhibition of the drive and assertion in suffragists' value, selfness, and worth. 

Now, we can begin to understand the significance of women's community cookbooks not only as impactful literature, but also as historical gems of the feminist movement that represent female solidarity and a collective, collaborative movement for change. Cookbooks passed down through communities and groups of women represent so much more than just recipes and a traditional gender role—they can be, and often are revolutionary in both feminist recovery and feminism in general. 


Hiding Spinach in the Brownies: Frame Alignment in Suffrage Community Cookbooks, 1886-1916
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742837.2015.1027764

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