A 102-Year-Old Lesson on Inspiring Wives to Cook

4-02-2009 @2:26PM BraH said... I disagree. The point of the story is that doing things well makes you feel better about doing them, rather than half-assing it and being aggravated by the act. I enjoy cooking as much as an artist likes painting a picture, just as she said. It's not drudgery in the least.

When you clean your house, top to bottom leaving no stone unturned, don't you get tremendous satisfaction when you finish and take a look around? Try cleaning when people aren't coming over. Clean for the sake of cleaning. I'm a man, with a manly job, and I like cooking and cleaning. If I'm the exception, should I be?

I am firmly in favor of all high school students being required to take a Home Economics class. Home money management, the basics of cooking and cleaning, sanitation, preparation, organization, all of it. These are the things that are lacking today, the things that lead us to be a nation of fast-food junkies, as if fast food was even worth fifty cents on the dollar you pay for it.

Reply

4-02-2009 @2:57PM Monika said... BraH-
There's a world of difference between choosing to clean or cook for yourself and the world telling you that you need to do it for a man.

As for cleaning, feeling relieved and good that your place is clean, and loving the act of scrubbing, sweeping and the other acts of dirt removal are quite different. Perhaps you like it, but I quite hate the process, even though I love the results.

It's a matter of context. If you can find a way to enjoy something, it makes it better, but it's not an excuse to keep women in the home. I agree that everyone should learn how to do things for themselves. But to read that men have to eat and someone has to do the cooking, and that her father loved telling the story of how trying to please him drove her to upset tears -- that's just sad.

And if she was right, I'd be a rich engineer right now, since I usually got better math grades than english grades. :)
Reply

4-02-2009 @3:25PM BraH said... Monika-

You know as well as anyone else that those sexist ideals have already been done away with. Yeah, in our society it's funny to read things like that and see what was socially acceptable a century ago, but I don't understand how anyone could be outraged by this if taken in the proper context. Feminism was and is about being able to make a choice between a career lifepath and a domestic path. Unfortunatly, modern feminists advocate only one of those, the Career Woman, and look down upon those that *choose* to fill the traditional role.

When I read it, and reread it now, I don't see the sexist distinctions as so black and white. *People* have to eat and *someone* has to do the cooking. Oh noes, her father kept telling the story about her crying in a cookbook, excuse me while I shed a single tear.

Cooking is a basic life skill that far too many people are ignorant of, just like knowing how and when to use certain cleaning products for a particular situation. This is the kind of knowledge that shouldn't be confined to the Greatest Generation.

My wife, a psychiatrist, says that most depressed people don't have terrible lives, but an imbalance or mental block prevents them from gaining satisfaction from everyday occurances like tidying up or cooking a good meal. Enjoyment can't only come from consumption, but has to also involve enjoying the act of preparation right down to making the marinade hours before or defrosting the day before. You say that you hate the process and love the results, but I submit that your love of the results should be distributed to the act as well. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Reply

4-02-2009 @4:12PM Anne said... BraH I couldn't agree with you more. Yes, of course it's fantastic that women have a choice now, and some women choose not to cook and do the housekeeping, and others split the duties with their husband (like myself). But no matter who does everything, and no matter what is being done, I don't see the point of doing a half-assed job just because you see it as drudgery. For instance: God, I would not want to work at McDonald's, but if I did, I think that I would try and take some kind of pride in my job to keep my sanity, rather than spending the day wishing I was back home. The same can apply to cooking and cleaning.

Of course it's not always easy to keep that feeling of care, and it's easy to slip into "Oh god this is so boring when will it end", but trying to put some pride and attention into everything you do is a good goal. It's kind of Buddhist if you think about it.
Reply

4-02-2009 @5:32PM BraH said... if anything at MickeyD's was worth taking pride in

Unfortunately Anne, we're the minority nowadays.

I've considered teaching on the side, away from my butcher shop, especially a class that teaches kids how to deal with the day-to-day of independent adult life. Cooking, cleaning (yes, you can do it wrong!), money management, gardening and plant care, pet care, basic car repairs like changing a flat tire and identifying problems, simple things like how to make tea and coffee (people really don't know!), using and caring for cast iron as well as reseasoning, meat safety and storage, all sorts of things along those lines.

Our kids will need to know all that, and while mine will, I want everyone else's to be able to take care of themselves as well. People without this knowledge scare me, like this woman who is wealthy enough to afford OnStar but... just read it.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/bizarre/6354195.html
Reply

4-02-2009 @7:17PM mitzireams said... Somebody has to do the cooking, and just surveying the people at my lunch table, if a woman does not do it, the men bring cheap, nasty frozen dinners or PBJ on white bread, or get fast food. These are medical researchers. IT IS NOT SEXIST to divide labor according to the physical and mental abilities of people. I cannot physically start our weed eater. It is not advisable for me to lift 40 pound bags of mulch. I do not really care which species of grass is good. But I am a speed reader and an obsessively healthy eater, and I have a collection of recipes and aprons. The more I work outside the home, the more I realize that everyone who works a full time job needs a "wife" at home to take care of things. It is not intellectually stultifying to figure out how to lower your husband's blood pressure by 20 points with food, or to have a clean house and clothes you custom-made to fit. The skills of a good home-maker are diverse and fulfilling, and the woman in the picture wears no chains. She does not have the harried look of a mom home from work unloading the kids from car seats and dinner from bags and boxes, starting her after-work full time job of clearing a path from room to room while her husband helps with baths and bedtime and homework. Try sometime, when you have vacation time, just staying home and doing some "wifely" tasks as well as you would if you were being paid $100,000. You'll be surprised how good it feels.
Reply

4-02-2009 @9:23PM Andi said... I sometimes enjoy cooking when and if I get around to it. But unlike those women that used to be trapped within the home, I have far more important things I need to be doing so if someone told me to get back into the kitchen and that I'd "come to appreciate it" I'd tell them where to shove it.
Reply

4-02-2009 @10:03PM BraH said... Andi-

That housework that you so readily malign and insult is nothing more than a difference in priority. Nobody is chained in their kitchen, like mitzireams said so well.

Open your mind and try it sometime. Nobody on their deathbed ever says they wish they'd spent more time rushing around.
Reply

4-03-2009 @3:19PM Karen said... I find it interesting that some are offended at the thought of pleasing someone else. Especially if that someone else is your spouse that you supposedly love.

I have no problem with those quotes. Clearly, taken in context, they are perfectly acceptable.

Cleaning the house and cooking are skills and fewer and fewer people seem to possess those skills today. I find it interesting that people look down on them when it is so rare to see someone perform these duties well. I don't really care who does these duties (man, woman, professional help, trained monkey). They are perfectly respectable skills and those that don't take pride in them are the ones I feel sorry for.
Reply

4-12-2009 @5:23PM Jodi said... You'll notice that the writer of the NYTimes letter elevates cooking and housekeeping to the status of being a fine lawyer....if you are skilled and enjoy doing it.

I wish the rest of the world would see it that way. What's wrong with training people to cook and keep house? Where did Home Ec classes go?

No, women shouldn't be tied to their homes, and husbands and boys can certainly learn and excel at these skills, too.

Martha Stewart, the Food Channel, et. al., wouldn't be such big hits if we weren't at least interested in doing these things well.

And I don't understand the "I'm not cooking/waiting/serving/ for no MAN..." attitude. No, you are not your husband/partners servant, certainly. But what's wrong about doing something for the benefit of him? Mow the lawn and change the oil while he cooks your favorite dinner, if that's how your household divides the labor, that's fine.

Sometimes my BF will cook breakfast for me....and he's not fond of cooking. But there's something about his fried eggs and potatoes that I just love...he does it for me. I don't care for rhubarb, but I make rhubarb pies for him. He keeps my car filled with gas. He does his own shirts because he likes to, and he knows that I'm happy to NOT do his shirts, lol. He mops the floors.

We do things for each other, and I would never refuse to make him a stupid pie just because someone, somewhere, might think that I'm enslaving the women by doing so.

Pffft.

I swear, so many people treat their spouses/family worse than they'd treat a perfect stranger.



Reply