ABSTRACT
Cooking was an essential part of women’s reproductive labor, identity, and power, especially if domestic work was their main occupation. As forty-oneyear-old Sergia put it, Listen, I’m a housewife. If I don’t know how to cook, you tell me, what else is there? At least if I worked, understand? It’s important for a housewife to know how to cook, to know how to do other things too, but cooking is the essential thing. Her words recalled the legacy of mezzadria, where the massaia did the cooking and “there was no other way”
This chapter uses Florentines’ food-centered narratives to portray how the transition to modernity affected men’s and women’s allocation of production and reproduction, which many feminists have deemed critical to gender status and power. On the mezzadria peasant farms, as we saw in Chapter 3, women’s work involved both reproduction in the home and production in the courtyard, garden, and fields. But when peasants left the countryside, they experienced a process typical of capitalism and urbanization: the splitting of reproduction and production, the former into the domestic, private sphere of unpaid labor for the family, and the latter into the public sphere of paid work. Production was associated with men and socially valued, while reproduction was viewed as women’s “natural” duty, isolated in the home, and taken for granted. The transformation of women’s “socially necessary labor into a private service” severely undermined their social status (Leacock 1972, 41).
