When I was 15, our maths teacher gave us life advice. Girls, she said, never learn to type and never learn to make a cup of tea. That way they can’t make you into secretaries.
She was the last of her generation, coming up for retirement in 1990, a teenager in the Blitz, among few women at university in the late 1940s. She returned to teach at her old school, a girls’ school in Manchester founded by Victorian liberals and feminists who wanted their daughters as well educated as their sons. The curriculum was old-fashioned and thorough – Latin, a bit of Greek; several modern languages; physics, chemistry and biology taught separately and expertly from the age of 11 – and though I was unhappy there, I have been grateful for the education all my life. We were explicitly discouraged from learning domestic and administrative skills, directed firmly towards the abstract and theoretical by women who had to choose between family and professional life. Several of our teachers had PhDs but had to give up academic careers for school-teaching after marrying male academics whose ambitions obviously, naturally, took priority. We benefited from their expertise and learned from their experience. Don’t learn to cook. That way no one can make you into his housekeeper.
I did learn to cook. My mother and grandmother were both excellent, enthusiastic cooks, and both also had professional lives, as my great-grandmother (a dressmaker) and great-great-grandmother (small business owner) had before them. (It’s probably no coincidence that all these women were also only children, but more on reproductive healthcare and women’s financial independence another time.) I could see that competence in the kitchen was not the enemy of competence in the lecture theatre and the classroom. I did not have the vocabulary for it then, but it’s apparent to me now that there was class anxiety masquerading as or with feminism. It wasn’t that our teachers thought we should marry men who would cook and clean – though several of us did in the end – but that skivvying was for other women, lesser women lacking our opportunities. Don’t become one of them, pretty airheads in frilly aprons with nothing in their heads but sponge cakes and flower-arranging.
It is one of the great joys of my life to have friends around my table
This rhetoric made me feel guilty about my pleasure in domestic life. Like my mother and grandmother, I’ve always had a tense and intense relationship with my own appetite, but I like to cook and feed other people. I like starting from the beginning, making bread and yoghurt and pickles and jam. I like baking, even though there are days when I’m uncomfortable with cake in the house. I love to knit and sew. I wouldn’t say I like cleaning, but I married a man and we raised boys who do, or at least whose dislike of dirt kicks in before mine, and who don’t mind clearing up when I decide that while the oven’s on anyway for the bread I’m also going to make everything in my new cookbook. It is one of the great joys of my life to have friends around my table.
But according to my teachers, at school and also later, implicitly, at university, all this was the enemy of promise. If I wanted to be a serious writer, I should be shut away in a room of one’s own, shut away in my head not noticing what I eat or wear, not thinking about how nice it looks outside and what would be good for lunch, but disembodied, pure. You can see where it came from, especially for mid-century middle-class women whose claims to intellectual and professional life were precarious and endlessly contested, who could escape the kitchen only by refusing to go near it, refusing to learn, making themselves useless in one sphere so they had to be allowed into another. Rejecting the idea that bodily matters are feminine and intellectual matters masculine, they had to erase the female body to claim the power of the female mind. Needs must, perhaps, but now I long for ways of thinking and writing and cooking that admit wholeness and integrity, a life’s work rooted in the acceptance that there is no thinking but with and in the body; that in the most serious and simple way, food is love.