Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture

Stacy Gillis, Joanne Hollows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135894269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

The relationship between feminism and domesticity has recently come in for renewed interest in popular culture. This collection makes an intervention into the debates surrounding feminism's contentious relationship with domesticity and domestic femininities in popular culture. It offers an understanding of the place of domesticity in contemporary popular culture whilst considering how these domesticities might be understood from a feminist perspective. All the essays contribute to a more complex understanding of the relationships between feminism, femininity and domesticity, developing new ways of theorizing these relationships that have marked much of feminist history. Essay topics include Marguerite Patten, reality television shows like How Clean is Your House?, the figure of the maid in contemporary American cinema, aging or widowed domestic femininities, and the relationship between domesticity and motherhood.

Part I
Feminism, Postfeminism and Domestic Femininity

1
Marguerite Patten, Television Cookery and Postwar British Femininity

Rachel Moseley

The focus of this chapter is the British daytime television cookery programme in the 1940s and 1950s, and its participation in the discursive construction of post-war British domestic femininities.¹ ‘Lifestyle’ television in Britain has been increasingly a focus of scholarship and much of this work has focused on the role of this kind of television in producing historically specific gendered identities.² In this chapter, I take a key moment in the history of this television genre—the emergence of the cookery show after the return of the television service between June 1946 and April 1947—and explore its significance in constructing domestic British femininities in the postwar period. In particular, I am interested here in thinking about the ways in which the work of Marguerite Patten, one of the first British television cookery presenters and a prolific cookery writer, can be seen to have attended to questions we would now understand as engaging with a feminist agenda. In her concern with the life of the working woman, Patten acknowledged the difficulties experienced by the woman both running a home and doing paid work outside, and offered suggestions to help women manage their domestic and professional responsibilities. Equally, the practices of television archiving remain a feminist issue: little audiovisual material remains from this early period, and particularly from those genres which were clearly marked as ‘television for women’.³ I have used a combination of archival materials (papers, letters, memos and floor plans held at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham, and the Radio Times) and oral history methods—a long, semistructured interview with Marguerite Patten⁴—to think about the significance of these early programmes for women and to examine their role in addressing and producing British postwar femininities. These programmes work towards producing a vision of British postwar womanhood as, in a complex way, simultaneously in the home and outside it, a figure both with enormous responsibility and expertise and in need of (re)education and support. In the discourses surrounding this programming, there is both recognition of woman’s knowledge and skill and emphasis on her role as a trainee within the home. In this respect then, Teresa de Lauretis’ notion of “technologies of gender” remains eminently useful in thinking about the ways in which cultural products and practices shape identity, representation and self-representation in particular, historically determined and determining ways (2). My particular interest is in Patten’s perhaps unexpectedly feminist address to the figures of the housewife and the woman working outside the home—and the intersection of the two, which, while often obscured in popular memory and public discourse, has been recently attended to in scholarship and emerges as central to Patten’s address to the woman watching daytime television in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, there is evidence of a feminist recognition of women’s difficult dual role, and an attempt to address it in practical, everyday ways. In this chapter, I begin to explore, from a feminist perspective, the ways in which British television has simultaneously offered and refused an address to the woman working both within and outside the home.

Patten became a household name through her work in radio and then television, presenting cookery items within programmes including Designed for Women (1947), Cookery Lesson (1949) and Cookery Club (1956) on BBC television. Women’s daytime television programming of the late 1940s and early 1950s was shown on one or two weekday afternoons on BBC television, under the umbrella of magazine programmes For the Housewife (1947–1950), Designed for Women (1947–1951), About the Home (1951–1958) and Mainly for Women (1955–1959), generally between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Within these programmes there were several items including literature, art, music, fashion, shopping, DIY, childcare and cookery which varied with each programme. Patten is so important partly because she was one of British television’s first ‘public women’ across radio, television, industry and food writing. She was an advisor in the Food Advice Division of the Ministry of Food, running their bureau at Harrods during the war, and was a vital and well-known presence on radio programmes such as the five-minute Kitchen Front (1940–1945) and Woman’s Hour (1946–), in public demonstrations, and then later on women’s daytime television in the postwar period. It is clear from the programme files that Patten was given the freedom to determine much of what was covered and discussed within her items and her detailed running order for Cookery Club for December 20, 1956 (a competition programme, of which Patten was president, where the housewife members sent in recipes, with the winning housewife coming in to the studio to make her dish on live television), included shot types and transitions and showed clearly that she determined some of the style of the programme and provided the captions.⁵ Patten had an important didactic role in the wartime and postwar periods, and I want to draw out two aspects of her ‘mission’ on women’s television after the war.

(RE)EDUCATING WOMEN: THE HOUSEWIFE ON THE HOME FRONT

Patten described her main job as “to help the wife at home cook properly” and her work brings some of the propagandist discourse from the Ministry of Food into postwar television in the late 1940s and 1950s. This educative address was, of course, closely tied to the BBC’s Public Service Remit and the impetus to “inform, educate and entertain” according to the Reithian values underpinning the institution. In particular, her work was centred on the importance of teaching and on educating (and re-educating) young women in the skill and craft of running a home and caring for a family, as well as, as she put it, “to help people through a difficult period”. In interview and in her correspondence with the BBC, she talked a great deal about the need to teach women how to manage their home in the immediate postwar period when rationing was still in place and there was a highly reduced selection of foods to choose from. The focus of Patten’s work, then, immediately after the war, was on showing women cheap, filling and exciting meals to make with what was available. When rationing ended, she saw the viewers of programmes like About the Home and Cookery Club as a community of women who had grown up without being educated in household management as a result of the war, and her job as to reeducate them about both shopping for food and what to do with it. In a planning memo from S. E. Reynolds to the Head of Talks in 1953, a fortnightly item on ‘Cheaper Meats’ within About the Home is suggested, with the rationale that “[h]ousewives for the past 14 years have not been able to select meat they require; many have no knowledge of anything beyond joint, chops, steak. It is proposed therefore that Mr Gerrard of the College of Food Technology, Smithfield, shall show them where the various parts of meat come from”.⁶ The 1954 BBC press release for this series suggests the lack of housewifery expertise of those women married since 1939: “It is not claimed that the programmes have done more than act as an introduction to a complex subject—much more work needs to be done to make present day housewives as knowledgeable and selective as their mothers”.⁷ Here, these women are positioned as ‘lacking’ in knowledge and experience, which television, through Patten, would provide. Patten also frequently used the programmes to demonstrate new technologies like pressure cookers and refrigerators.

While production files for the programmes on which she presented show that Patten did sometimes talk about entertaining, the focus was mostly on the skills needed for the working woman to manage everyday cooking. Television’s role as a technology of gender is particularly evident in these files with comments such as this in a letter from Marguerite Patten to S. E. Reynolds, who produced many of these shows, in May 1952. She writes: “I wonder if someone thinks it’s a good idea to do something to interest older girls in INTERESTING cooking, so they can acquire a liking for it from an early age?”⁸ There is a clear anxiety here about the loss of a gendered skill, home economics, which as Penny Tinkler (37) and Elizabeth Wilson (33) point out, had long been an integral part of elementary and some secondary education for all but the most academically able girls. Indeed, this concern remained part of Patten’s mission throughout her career, from her concern with “the young housewife”⁹ and “going back to first principles— how not to drown greenstuffs etc”.¹⁰ on television and in later books such as The How to Cook Book (1970), which was aimed squarely at the young, novice or ‘even’ the bachelor cook, “to give them a good knowledge of basic cookery, food know-how and kitchen equipment and utensils” (Patten, 1970: jacket). Patten saw her addressees in the late 1940s and early 1950s as two main groups in need of advice and retraining: on one hand, there were women who wanted to get back to traditional cooking after rationing had ended and ingredients were becoming available again, asking Patten in correspondence, as she remembered: ‘“I’ve forgotten how to make a good Yorkshire pudding, I’ve forgotten how to keep the meat nice and pink, I’ve forgotten how to get the crackling on pork and I want to make a really good Dundee cake’—that was as things came easier”, and on the other, there were young women who had never been taught to shop and cook. These, she suggested, may have been women who had served abroad, often straight from university into the forces. These are suggested as middleclass women who had done professional work outside the home and who may have married during the war, but had never been taught about how to run a home, manage a budget, shop and cook for a family: “They’d never cooked, they’d never even shopped for food, so I had to teach them. ‘This is stewing meat, now look at that and recognize it, it’s such and such a cut. This is the kind of meat you can use for roasting. This is plaice’, and I’d also got sole, ‘this is how you tell the difference’.” The clearest concern of Patten’s television work in this period is the education and reeducation of the British housewife in relation to food and the economics of the kitchen. About the Home and Cookery Club also brought the ordinary woman into the television studio to participate in the broadcast.

It is useful to reflect on this significant shift in relation to the Ministry of Information food films from where Patten’s instructional discourse clearly, in part, derives. Though little audiovisual material from these programmes remains, it is possible to observe both fundamental continuities and shifts from wartime food films to postwar television, some of which are, interestingly, the result of the shift in medium. The Ministry of Information’s short food films were shown both as part of the regular cinema programme (five-and fifteen-minute films and one- or two-min...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Feminism, Postfeminism and Domestic Femininity
• Part II Figures of Domestic Femininity
• Part III Domestic Femininity in Reality and Lifestyle Television
• Contributors
• Index