The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 by Sara Pennell

Author:Sara Pennell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

A woman’s place?

The kitchens, butteries and all other offices pertaining, were … part of the establishment … and well under the housewife’s supervision.111

The notion of the ‘kitchen’ as a zone increasingly privatized and feminized across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been widely debated and more recently decried by archaeologists and historians. It is now accepted that the gendering of domestic space and of domestic activities (which may indeed not map onto one another) ought to be sought in broader discussions of the transformations of domestic labour and occupational patterns, of economic organization, and of familial and social networks across the early modern period, and at the local and national scale.112 But for all this, it remains a room that errs towards the ‘female’ in the popular imagination. In this concluding section, I want to return to the material cultures and technologies of the kitchen, as well as the range of kitchen work and people to be found in this space, to reinforce the idea that in the early modern household, the kitchen emerges not so much as a gender-specific zone – the housewife’s, the housekeeper’s, the cook’s – but rather as a space in which the authority of women and men, vested in different types of knowledge (culinary, medical, technical, all of which we might gather under the term ‘œconomic’), and expressed through different socio-economic and cultural identities (mistress/master, servant/apprentice/employee, houseowner/tenant or lodger, child) might be negotiated. In other words, while gender remains ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’, so too are space, status, materiality and the social relations constructed thereby and therein.113 Indeed, while by the middle of the nineteenth century writers of every stamp might eulogize the drawing room or nursery as the locus of Victorian womenhood triumphant, the kitchen continued to disrupt the smooth surface of feminized domesticity. ‘Below stairs’ remained liminal, and the kitchen an ambivalent space: a space in which it was unclear whether women should or must or wanted to demonstrate their power and knowledge, as rational managers of servants and supplies; or submit to subjugation, as hands-on housewives; or indeed opt out of either of these discourses, in favour of an ‘above stairs’ ideology of maternal and uxorial care centred on the family rather than the dwelling, mothers and ministering angels to people not things.

Women’s things

Let us reconsider the stuff of the kitchen, ‘pots and pans’. The conventional view (both popularly and academically) is that these objects sit low in any league table of ‘significant’ material culture; and that, by extension, as ‘women’s things’ of the most mundane sort, they merit little discussion when more attractive commodities are in view, such as teapots and calicos. This convention arises out of two, slightly different debates. Firstly there is the assertion of the routine nature of the pots and pans themselves: the archaeologist Anne Yentsch has argued that the functional nature of much kitchen equipment – especially the ‘plain’ ceramics of the kitchen – meant that these were not ‘objects to which [female] power accrued’.

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