My Mom, Mrs. Swanson and Tucker Carlson

Gadget Lust, Part 2: The Kitchen and the Ideal Housewife

In an earlier Substack newsletter I wrote about how the change in kitchen technologies made an impact on women in mid-twentieth century America. If you haven’t read it yet, you should probably read that first.

When my mother was young, she visited the 1939 World’s Fair, where, along with memorable chocolate milkshakes from the Borden Pavillion, she got a glimpse of the glamorous, automated world she might grow up in.

I’m not sure Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, offered quite that glamor when she moved there from New York City as a young bride in 1952. It was there she found her very own kitchen of the future in the otherwise drab faculty house she shared with my father. It had sturdy white metal cabinets, a refrigerator-freezer and an electric stove with a sunken well for warming soup and baby bottles. That was the kitchen my mother rushed home from her job at the University of Illinois press (where, in order to be given the job, she had to promise not to get pregnant right away) to cook for my dad.

My mother’s experience was typical of her generation. After years of “doing without” during the Depression and then “making do” through World War II, Americans’ personal income surged in the 1950s, and the futuristic promises of the 1939 World’s Fair started to come true. Returning GIs and their growing families, bolstered by low-interest loans, moved to newly built suburbs. Massive developments such as Long Island’s Levittown and similar cookie-cutter tract-homes became widespread. Industries that had expanded production for the war now turned their might to producing consumer commodities, such as washing machines, toasters and, yes, white metal kitchen cabinets. The kitchen of the future was here, now, save maybe for self-mopping floors, although those were already on General Electric’s drawing boards.

American consumer desire post-war began to resemble adolescent male sexual desire: A perpetual state of arousal and the constant seeking of quick relief.

After years of frugality and ration books, Americans were encouraged by the government to buy. Not that they needed much encouragement. The appliance arms-race was on: over the next 60 years, kitchens became bigger, kitchen counters became clogged with new toys, and new technology further streamlined cooking. These advances changed our tastes and eating habits forever. 

The kitchen was of critical importance to the American ideal of motherhood, and advertising combined with our obsession with innovation and consumerism put a new spin on an old role — in part by playing on the guilt of women. (Which is a longer story for another day.)

The American kitchen has metamorphosed along with the dynamics of the American family. More than any other room in the house, the kitchen reflects American values and aspirations and has since the first ember-tossing stove was installed. Decade-after-decade, new product after new product has allowed Americans to boast about their climb up the social ladder with goods like self-defrosting freezers, Corian countertops and breakfast made entirely of modern frozen foods. Kitchen technology mirrors scientific developments and technological achievements, from microwave technology to baby formulas to Tang, the vaguely-orange-juice-like drink mix endorsed by NASA. 

Post-war America’s eating habits were affected by industrial food developments. The military worked closely with industry to make meals easier to transport and prepare. When the war was over, companies such as General Mills, focused their marketing of these new-fangled processed foods on civilians and their brand new kitchens with electric refrigerators.

What I’ve realized while researching is that my mother didn’t hate food and cooking, as I frequently thought over many years of pallid pot roast dinners made with onion soup mix, watery frozen vegetables and mashed potatoes from a box. My mother was actually the epitome of modern. She was on America’s brave new frontier: canned soup, TV dinners and their cousins-in-convenience from the freezer were new and exciting for her, allowed more time for her work and to take care of her family. If frozen food wasn’t miracle enough, the microwave that arrived in our kitchen circa 1982 and could cook dinner in mere minutes was like the Red Sea parting and water turning to wine all at once. My mother’s kitchen, with a Panasonic microwave as its focal point, was the pinnacle of modernity for her.

My otherwise very a la page, brilliant and elegant mother could hardly understand why I would want to spend time making my own lasagna when Stouffer’s had a perfectly good one that just needed heating.

Not my mother.

Before she died, I had her annotate a copy of Laura Shapiro’s brilliant book Something from the Oven, so I could know her first-person experience as a young bride in the 50s. She returned the book to me, her notes in the margins, in an empty Stouffer’s lasagna box, where it sits on my bookshelf. A few of her comments:

“MAC” was my great aunt, Margie Cohn, who worked with her husband at their antiquarian bookstore in New York City and then, apparently, would come home and make some magical Bisquick casserole.

With all due respect to Laura Shapiro, my mother was in vehement disagreement about Nescafé. Also, “twaddle” is one of my favorite words.

My MSNBC-watching mother was aghast when she found out Tucker Carlson was heir to the Swanson frozen food empire. And as much as we enjoyed TV dinners when my dad wasn’t home, she didn’t think they were emblematic of an era. Is it bad I’m sort of craving the meatballs and mashed potato dinner?

And like any good housewife, here’s a bit of housekeeping:

Secret Life of Cookies pod and recipe upcoming! I’ll be posting a recipe Saturday for an apple-raspberry pie to coincide with the latest episode of my Secret Life of Cookies podcast, with guest Kimberly Atkins-Stohr, she of the #Sisters-in-Law podcast and The Boston Globe. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

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