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Book Review
| Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. By Jessamyn Neuhaus. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii, 336 pp. $42.95, ISBN 0-8018-7125-5.)
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| For some of us who have utilized cookbooks as sourcesrelatively few historians until recently, it should be saidthere has been a conversion experience: "Oh, I get it. Cookbooks can be used to reconstruct traditionally female work in the same way that blueprints can to reconstruct male work." Indeed, employed with sensitivity to their limitations, cookbooks constitute a very revealing source. It is, therefore, good news for the field of women's history that more scholars are beginning to mine cookbooks, as in the work under review. |
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Jessamyn Neuhaus sets out to survey American cookbooks published from the 1790s to the 1960s. Commendably, she has worked hard to locate a large number of mainstream books for scrutiny, always aware that they primarily reflect the experiences of middle-class white women. Moreover, she is attentive to the fact that just because a recipe shows up in a cookbook does not mean that it was actually prepared. Her goal is to chart changes in gender ideology as they are reflected in the implicit assumptions about and/or prescriptions for the housewife that have appeared along with the recipes. |
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