“A woman’s place is in the kitchen.” A refrain every young girl encounters at some point in their life, whether said with jest, irony, or conviction. I need not expound on the deep historical roots of relegating women to the domestic sphere, quarantined to the tile floors and shackled to the stove, in order for the patriarchy to maintain its tenuous grip on societal power. For a millennium, the world has, literally and figuratively, fed off the unrecognized and unpaid labours of women as they toiled under the reign of the cult of domesticity.
Within the broad scheme of history, women have only recently liberated themselves from the demands of virtue, subservience, and piety. Women have carved out their place in the working world; the factory workers of the Industrial Revolution, the nurses of the World Wars, the typists and secretaries of the 1950s, and the blazoned and blazer-ed businesswomen of the 1980s have opened the horizon for women to work in any field of their choice — theoretically.
In the domestic cult, the kitchen is societally prescribed as the “women’s domain.” However, the restaurant industry has traditionally been a heavily masculinized, male-dominated sphere, à la Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Take, for example, the alpha-male figure of Head Chef-cum-bully embodied by Gordon Ramsay or the toxic testosterone-laced pressure of commercial kitchens seen in FX’s The Bear. While women make up 52% of the overall restaurant workforce, they only occupy 30% of executive roles. In 2022, out of the 2,286 Michelin-starred restaurants, only 6% were female-led.
There has always been a tension of theory in women making a career off the “domestic” arts — turning something that has historically limited women into a means of profit and, for some, fame. A revived wave of discourse surrounding the idea of a “career homemaker” has risen following the release of Ina Garten’s memoir, Martha Stewart’s documentary, and, most recently, Meghan Sussex’s Netflix series. Sussex’s show was met with reviews divided between praising her pure appeal to making moments of joy and rolling their eyes at her out-of-touch, inauthentic demonstrations of “useless information” (harvesting honey, arranging flowers, or making jam) in an $8 million home. Whether her series and affiliated brand As Ever are indeed a “Montecito ego trip” intended purely to line the ex-royal coffers, the show’s essential nature as a capitalist venture profiting off the work many women do unacknowledged remains.
The discourse has reversed: progressive feminism has slated women working in the kitchen — particularly when their toils benefit their family — as categorically regressive. Social media has had a heyday with the idea of “tradwives,” (“traditional wives” that ascribe to the heteronormative cult of domesticity, often linked to conservative politics and anti-feminist rhetoric) so much so that it feels like being a woman interested in cooking and baking (especially doing so for others) is almost taboo. Female content creators like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, who made their names off making food from scratch for their small army of children, continually dodge accusations of tradwifery. Others — notably, those without children, like Meredith Hayden — are praised for their culinary genius and business savvy. Male content creators who make food for their families, however, are praised as “empowering” for defying gender norms. Regardless of whether Smith’s and Neeleman’s videos actually contain subliminal messages of conservative politics, the accusation hinges on the idea of women demonstrating a domestic lifestyle of tranquillity and family, wiped clean of any sign of distress or toil.
A pattern thus emerges: women are reclaiming cooking as a form of joy and a source of self-affirming power. The media then attempts to skew it as either a play for profit or political propaganda. We arrive at an impasse. How can women stand in the kitchen without standing for a cause? It hinges on the motivating force behind her work: is she cooking for passion? As a display of love and care? Or as a career?
Ultimately, women shouldn’t need to defend their motivations or explicate their politics for the gratification of the media. Cooking is unique in its ability to act as a form of power, joy, respite, and resistance, depending on who wields the knife. As long as she steps into the kitchen voluntarily, cooking can mean anything she chooses.