Hunger on the Homepage: Reading Suffrage Cookbooks and Food Blogs

Abstract

| This essay examines women’s articulation of hunger across a range of texts from women’s suffrage cookbooks of the Reconstruction and Progressive Eras in the United States to current women’s food blogs. It argues that these forms attempt to leverage food’s power to connect and empower women, but find their own limits within what Kyla Wazana Tompkins identifies as the reification and reproduction of “the chaste, white body” in Racial Indigestion (2012). Though two seemingly disparate forms, both suffrage cookbooks and food blogs feature women writing to other women about food and communicating a set of aesthetic and cultural values through the experiences of cooking and eating. Both The Woman Suffrage Cookbook (c. 1886), edited by Hattie Burr, and The Suffrage Cook Book (1915), edited by L. O. Kleber, were compiled and circulated in support of women’s voting rights. Through the recipes included in these texts, the women who contributed to them simultaneously express hunger for delicious food and for a political voice, two orally-driven desires. Although written and shared for personal enjoyment rather than explicit political ends, women’s food blogs also continue to articulate hunger for nourishment as well as community. Across both forms, the desire to express both physical and political hungers is limited by a simultaneous need to impose order around the embodied experience of eating and sharing food experiences. Tompkins’s reading of Sylvester Graham’s prescription of health as eliminating food items that would disrupt the intact body, and by association, a white social order, along with Minh-Ha T. Pham’s theory of “taste work” and “racial aftertastes” in Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet (2015), provide a theoretical lens through which to read these texts and their circulation of gendered, classed, and racial values. As modes of writing that satisfy a deeper hunger for other women’s experiences, the suffrage cookbooks and food blogs limit their own potential to engage food as a tool for connection and empowerment by inhabiting a subject position of uninterrogated whiteness and class privilege. Graduate Journal of Food Studies Hunger on the Homepage: Reading Su rage Cookbooks and Food Blogs