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• Tuesday, October 23, 2007 08:44 AM

  Speaking of female "chefs" (and I am doing it because Broadsheet hasn't gotten around to it- yet...

  Peg Bracken, unsung feminist heroine who wrote "The I Hate To Cook Book" and "The I Hate To Housekeep Book" died yesterday.

  Ms. Bracken's books, however "camp" today, were major breakthroughs for the trapped housewives (like my mom) in the early 60's. They dared to say that housework and cooking (strangely enough, she didn't touch on child care, at least not that I know) need not be the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence. If you can find short-cuts to cleaning the carpet and making a tasty meal for your family, by all means do so! That frees up time for you to relax, socialize or maybe actually do something that YOU want to do! (And for a lot of ladies, that eventually meant "Get a job" and other pre-feminist acts of rebellion.)

  In other words, there was a REASON for Ms. Bracken, Poppy Cannon, and other "can-opener cookery" advocates to rhapsodize about convenience foods and their place in the family's diet. Such recipes freed up the post-war wife to make use of her time elsewhere. However snobby we may feel about such an approach to eating today, we must give the Pegs of the world their "props" for contributing, however unwittingly, to the feminist movement of today.

  —Anonymous
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