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WHEN WAS IT DECIDED that certain foods are more appealing to women (think: yoghurt, salads, fruits, white wine) while others are geared towards men (red meat, whisky)? This gendering of food in the western world wasn’t spontaneous. Rather, beginning in the late 19th century, a steady stream of dietary advice, corporate advertising and magazine articles created a division between male and female tastes that has — ever since — shaped everything from dinner plans to menu designs.
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Before the Civil War, in American society the entire family ate the same things, together. The era’s best-selling household manuals and cookbooks never indicated that husbands had special tastes that women should indulge. Even though “women’s restaurants” — spaces set apart for ladies to dine unaccompanied by men — were commonplace, they nonetheless served the same dishes as the men’s dining room: offal, calf’s heads, turtles and roast meat.
Then, in the 1870s, shifting social norms like the entry of women into the workplace gave women more opportunities to dine without men and in the company of female friends or co-workers. However, even as more women spent time outside of the home, they were still expected to congregate in gender-specific places. Thus, chain restaurants geared toward women proliferated. They created alcohol-free safe spaces for women to lunch without experiencing the rowdiness of workingmen’s cafés or free-lunch bars (where patrons could get a free midday meal as long as they bought a beer — or two or three).
It was during this period that the notion that some foods were more appropriate for women started to emerge. Magazines and newspaper advice columns identified fish and white meat with minimal sauce, as well as new products like packaged cottage cheese, as “female foods”. And of course, there were desserts and sweets, which women, supposedly, couldn’t resist. This shift was reflected in menus for restaurants that catered to women: a list of light main courses, accompanied by elaborate desserts with ice cream, cake or whipped cream. Many menus featured more desserts than entrees.
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By the early 20th century, women’s food was commonly described as “dainty” — meaning fanciful but not filling. Women’s magazines included advertisements for typical female foodstuffs: salads, colourful and shimmering jelly creations, or fruit salads decorated with marshmallows, shredded coconut and maraschino cherries.
At the same time, self-appointed men’s advocates complained that women were inordinately fond of the very types of decorative foods being marketed to them. In 1934, for example, a male writer named Leone B Moates authored an article in ‘House And Garden’ magazine, scolding wives for serving their husbands “a bit of fluff like marshmallow-date whip”. Save these “dainties” for ladies’ lunches, he implored, and serve your husbands the hearty food they crave: goulash, chili or corned beef hash with poached eggs.
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Writers like Moates weren’t the only ones exhorting women to prioritise their husbands: The 20th century saw a proliferation of cookbooks telling women to give up their favourite foods and instead focus on pleasing their boyfriends or husbands. The central thread running through these titles was that if women failed to satisfy their husbands’ appetites, their men would stray.
You could see this in mid-century ads, like one showing an irritated husband saying “Mother never ran out of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.”
But this fear was exploited as far back as 1872, which saw the publication of a cookbook titled ‘How to Keep a Husband, or Culinary Tactics’. One of the most successful cookbooks, ‘The Settlement’ Cook Book’, first published in 1903, was subtitled “The Way to a Man’s Heart”. It was joined by recipe collections like 1917’s ‘A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband’ and 1925’s ‘Feed the Brute!’ This sort of marketing clearly had an effect. In the 1920s, one woman wrote to General Mills’ fictional spokeswoman “Betty Crocker”, expressing fear that her neighbour was going to “capture” her husband … with her fudge cake!
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Around the 1970s, American dining changed dramatically. Families started spending more money eating out. More women working outside the home meant meals were less elaborate, especially since men remained loath to share the responsibility of cooking. The microwave encouraged alternatives to the traditional sit-down dinner while the women’s movement destroyed lady-centred luncheonettes and upended the image of the happy housewife preparing her condensed soup casseroles or Chicken Yum Yum. Yet, despite these social changes, the depiction of male and female tastes in western advertising has remained surprisingly consistent, even as some new ingredients and foods have entered the mix. This is how kale, quinoa and other healthy food fads are gendered as “female”. Barbecue, bourbon and “adventurous foods”, on the other hand, are the domain of men.
Paul Freedman is professor of History at Yale. This essay originally appeared on The conversation and has been republished under the Creative Commons Licence.
