Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-215) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Taste and the American cookbook -- Taste and virtue: domestic citizenship and the New Republic -- Taste and morality: motherhood and the making of a national body -- Taste and the region: The constitutive function of southern cookbooks -- Taste and science: cooking schools, home economics, and the progressive impulse -- Taste and race: revisions of labor and domestic literacy in the early twentieth century -- Epilogue: the relevance of taste.
Summary:
Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity. Taste discourse engages cultural values as well as physical constraints, and thus serves as a bridge between the contested space of the self and the body, particularly for women in the nineteenth century. Cookbooks represent important contact zones of social philosophies, cultural beliefs, and rhetorical traditions, and through their rhetoric, we witness women's roles as republican mothers, sentimental evangelists, wartime fundraisers, home economists, and social reformers. Beginning in the early republic and tracing the cookbook through the publishing boom of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive era, and rising racial tensions of the early twentieth century, Sarah W. Walden examines the role of taste as an evolving rhetorical strategy that allowed diverse women to engage in public discourse through published domestic texts.
Series:
Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.