GenderWhy a woman's place is in the kitchen
Back in the 1970s, when she launched the feminist magazine Spare Rib, Rosie Boycott was adamant that women should not waste their time cooking. Now she wonders if she went a bit too far ...Today Britain has the dubious distinction of being the largest consumer of ready meals in Europe - everything from Pot Noodles to sophisticated concoctions such as duck à l'orange and chicken à la king. Not only has home cooking declined, but in many households these pre-assembled dishes are consumed individually, all over the house, when and where family members want. Food - once something that brought adults and children together around the kitchen table - is now yet another way to avoid family life.
Thirty-five years ago, however, you could buy little in the ready meals line other than Vesta Curries, a dried concoction sold in an exotic-looking box which, every so often, my mother would dish up for dinner. I remember always being delighted by Vesta suppers, particularly because we often ate them in front of the television, the viewing of which was rationed by my father, who thought it a tremendous waste of time. They seemed to me to be a delicious alternative to my mother's monotonous meals. She did not like to cook, and I don't think she much enjoyed the business of eating. Her portions were always small, she did not like meat and she hated encountering something new and possibly strange.
I have a vivid memory of my parents and me going out to lunch in Denmark with some friends of my sister Collette's new Danish husband. The meal was long and lots of small courses were served: cold pork, salamis, liver paste, stuffed rolled beef and at least five varieties of pickled herring. Not a vegetable in sight. My mother kept refusing the various plates as they were offered. Then came a large flat dish on which were arranged what looked like two or three packets of Birds Eye fish fingers - deep-fried, golden-coloured breaded rectangles, garnished with lemon wedges and crisp lettuce leaves. She brightened and helped herself to three.
I watched my mother trying to cut off a bite-sized piece, her enthusiasm giving way to horror as she realised that these breaded rectangles were not the same as those she so often dished up to her children, accompanied by frozen green peas and a dollop of ketchup. Our host spotted her consternation. "Fried whale skin - a great delicacy," he said, smiling happily as he speared a hefty chunk on to his fork. I could see her glancing around, clearly wondering where she might hide these fishy horrors. As our host launched into an involved story about whale hunting in Greenland, I watched her slide two of the breaded rectangles off the plate, into her hand and from there into the leather bag at her feet.
I do not remember her ever saying that something was delicious, or licking her fingers after scraping something tasty from the bottom of the pan. She made no effort to teach my sister or me to cook. Maybe she thought that school would take care of such matters, but all the domestic science I learned at Cheltenham Ladies' College involved making a blue-and-white shift dress, and a grey shirt for my boyfriend when I was 14. At home, we ate our way through a limited repertoire of dishes: chops with two veg; baked fillet of sole smothered in breadcrumbs and Heinz tomato ketchup; the occasional roast chicken. For dinner parties she became more adventurous: an egg mousse with a brilliant tomato-based hot sauce; a delicious coffee meringue pudding; and, for the main course, a boned shoulder of lamb in garlic, red wine and coriander, which she served with green beans and mashed potato. It proved that mum could cook, and cook well, when the occasion demanded. This meal was a big hit with dad and their friends, and in my memory it seems she always produced it whenever we had guests.
My mother was unusual among her peers in her dislike of things domestic, though in 1956, when Constance Spry published her 1,200-page magnum opus of recipes and cooking tips, she noted: "It is strange how low the subject ranks in the estimation of many academically minded people ... There is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers."
My mother, university-educated but frustrated by her subsequent life as a housewife, was clearly one of those who ranked cooking as a lowly pursuit, and she passed her lack of interest (and her attitude) on to me. In my turn, I furthered the belief that cooking was a demeaning pursuit for women who wanted to get on in a man's world.
In 1972, when I was 21, I co-founded Spare Rib magazine with an Australian friend called Marsha Rowe. The newly emerging feminist movement wanted to get women out of the typing pools and away from the kitchen sinks and into the boardrooms of the land. I remember being particularly adamant that the way to get ahead was to refuse to learn to type and to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. As an early subscription offer for the magazine, we printed a purple dish cloth, which, though tattered and a bit torn, is still in use in our home today. Written on it are the words: "First you sink into his arms, then your arms end up in his sink."
It neatly summed up our attitude. When we launched the magazine, we debated the issue of food (along with fashion and beauty) and, in the first year, we ran occasional articles about making your own cosmetics (mostly out of yoghurt mixed up with olive oil, cucumbers and egg whites), how to dress without being a fashion slave, and food pieces that, somehow, never actually involved cooking. We wanted to get away from the traditional fodder in magazines such as Woman and Woman's Own, where food preparation was lengthy, fiddly and a cause of stress as women strived to feed their families and throw memorable parties for their husbands' bosses. Later, we simply banished cooking from our pages.
We wanted women to learn traditional male skills, and for several years there was a monthly column entitled Spare Parts, which set out simple instructions as to how to change tyres, put up shelves or mend your own shoes. In the name of self-sufficiency, we once included a knitting pattern on the centre spread and were completely taken aback when the phone started ringing and women kept ordering more copies of the pattern. But cooking, in our minds, was wholly frivolous and politically dangerous, an activity that represented everything we were trying to change.
Indeed, the whole area of housework was a fraught area that women were just starting to examine. We felt that the lack of childcare, and women's inequality in the work place, created an enormous pressure on women to be good housewives, to become psychologically dependent on housework. I well remember some of the early letters that told stories of these "kitchen-sink blues". Housework - unpaid, lowly and trivial - was, in those days, a woman's only job, and in the social pecking order it was right down there at the bottom.
Raising women's self-esteem, as a first step to liberating them from the confines of the home, was one of feminism's earliest and most vital tasks. Much of that was achieved through consciousness-raising groups in which women shared their stories and gained confidence from each other. Just by admitting that their lives were frustrating and often downright miserable, women were able to gain confidence. Cooking, which we all knew could be a creative activity, was all too often very different - because husbands and children demanded meals on tap. The very act of shopping, preparing and serving up food was, for many (like my mother, I suspect), another shackle of a dependent life.
To drive home our point, we frequently analysed adverts that depicted women in "household" roles. One, for a can of Heinz toddler food, showed a woman squashed between her laden kitchen sink and the open door of her washing machine, with the words, "The puddings taste so nice you might forget who you bought them for." What was unwritten was that this was woman's natural home, between the washing machine and the cooking utensils. At her feet, her two children are pulling on the skirts of her apron, sending the powerful message that "Children need their mummy and home. She is the only provider of all their nourishment." The children look as if they are about to have a fight, so a further message goes out to say that if mummy wasn't there, those two would be committing fratricide on each other. On the drying rack are four plates - clearly the man of the house, the fourth member of the nuclear family, is on his way. Heinz was giving us the stereotyped pattern - dad at work, mum at home with the kids, and that was how things should stay.
Marsha, a little older than I was, could cook quite well, but it was never something she talked about. We both loved it when men (who always had more money) took us out to meals, where we would eat enough for five. At the time, I was living with the lexicographer Jonathon Green, who was a rather brilliant cook. I could manage a roast chicken and roast potatoes with two veg, but that was about it.
Possibly, if Marsha and I had had children of our own, we might have felt obliged to try to talk about such issues as healthy baby food, and this in turn might have led us to publishing recipes that were nutritious, but quick and easy to produce. As it was, food preparation was so entwined with the role of the housewife that we consigned it to the bin of history, alongside the short stories that promised you would "live happily ever after" once he had popped the question.
If the supermarkets we have today had existed then, I think I would have become an ardent devotee of ready meals (and an ardent faker, dishing up the meal and pretending it was my own). Certainly, I know my mother would have filled her trolley. She could have served up beef bourguignon, Lancashire hot pot, even a salmon fillet tastefully wrapped in flaky pastry, expanding her repertoire without the bother and the mess of handling raw meat. Indeed, she would not even have had to wonder about the living cow or sheep that had formed the basis of the dish, how it had lived and, more importantly to my mother, how it had died.
By the mid-1970s, more than half of all British households were equipped with the first wave of labour-saving electrical appliances: fridge-freezers, Kenwood mixers, non-stick pans and dishwashers. (Ours was an exception: till the end of her life, my mother always refused to have a dishwasher on the grounds that it was a waste of money. She would often start washing up a meal before everyone had finished eating - a habit that, on occasions, I sadly find myself repeating.) Supermarkets such as Sainsbury's had begun to fulfil the demand for convenience frozen foods, peas, pastry, pies and complete packaged meals.
Liberated from domestic slavery by these modern miracles, women were, in theory, no longer required to devote all their time to household chores. My generation of women wholeheartedly embraced the workplace - which was just as well, since two incomes were certainly better than one when it came to paying for the new technology.
By the 1980s - the decade of the superwoman who could work full time, bring up children, run a home and knock up a mid-week dinner party for eight - about a third of households owned microwaves, the ultimate gadget to minimise cooking time. The writing was on the wall for cookery in British homes.
In 2005, the Guardian analysed the contents of some of Britain's most popular ready meals: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie, "based on the Ivy restaurant's recipe" and sold to the public as a healthy meal that you could have made at home if you'd only had the time, contained 69 separate ingredients, including a large range of chemical flavourings and preservatives. When I make shepherd's pie, I use just six: mince, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, Worcester sauce and beef stock.
Today, cook books dominate the bestseller lists: most of them are destined to lie, unused, on kitchen shelves. Schools no longer teach cooking per se, just variants on subjects such as home technology, in which teachers explain to children how microwaves heat up food. Meanwhile, sales of ready meals continue to climb hand in hand with teenage obesity. It may be fanciful to lay the blame for this at the feet of the early feminists, but, without a doubt, our struggle to free women from the sheer drudgery of housework was a small link in the chain.
· Our Farm by Rosie Boycott is published by Bloomsbury on May 10, price £15.99. To order a copy for £14.99, including free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
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