Women in the Kitchen

In my research I examine the texts of Hungarian cookbooks published in the first and last ten years of the 20th century. I am looking for answers to the question of what kind of women’s image the cookbooks portray and what changes can be seen in the image of women in the two periods. Through textual analysis and by revealing narratives, I show the dimensions of the social expectations towards the housewife. I will highlight the narratives framing the relations between men and women in the sources and the ways in which women’s emancipation is represented in the texts. The main conclusion of my research is that social expectations of women in the kitchen sphere at the beginning and the end of the century are almost identical. In both periods, women are predominantly portrayed as housewives in the patriarchal gendered domestic sphere. Cookbooks from the two periods present similar expectations, tasks and responsibilities.