ABSTRACT
Carmen de Burgos fiction comprises ten full-length novels and more than eighty melodramatic novellas; her nonfiction includes high-profile essays on women's rights, a lengthy feminist treatise and twenty-seven practical manuals on topics ranging from seduction to cooking. The culinary education she proposes closely resembles feminist efforts elsewhere in the West to re-define domestic tasks into the field of home economics. Home economics allowed women to assume a professionalized role outside the home and gave them a role in public policy, expanding their housekeeping from the home to social and municipal contexts. Like the United States (US)-American home economists, Spanish women would be prepared to address cooking and nutrition as part of social policy, by working to improve "the material conditions of the popular class". Providing women a culinary education, Burgos argues, has the potential to strengthen the nation's public health and hygiene and improve the material conditions of Spain's working class.
