Tuesday, October 20, 2015

"Kitchen Design Isn't Sexist..."

All that stuff in our kitchens is, of course, why were able to leave them. Women in the 1920s spent about 30 hours every week preparing meals. Thanks to food processing technology and labor-saving appliances, that number has dropped into the single digits. Men have taken up some of the slack -- and it seems worth noting that standardizing kitchens too high for the average woman has probably made them more attractive to the average man. But even if you add in the culinary labors of our male partners, Americans are still spending less than a third as much time cooking dinner as our great-grandmothers did.
Women could never have gone into the workforce in the numbers they did if they had still been expected to spend 30 hours a week feeding their families. They were propelled into careers by the mass-produced modern kitchen, which, with all its flaws, remains one of the greatest feminist advances the world has ever seen. The occasional twinge in our backs or crick in our necks seems a relatively small price to pay.
Via Instapundit 

14 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

Yes, men inventing things, like birth control, liberated women.

Why it's so great for women to abandon their children to "professional" childcare in order to escape the home is another question.

The romance of the office worshipped by feminism baffles me. I worked in an office solely for money, and now that I'm retired, I hope to never see the inside of an office again. There is nothing worth doing in a corporate office, You're surrounded by people you know for a while and never see again.

And, I'm pretty happy spending half days babysitting my three grandchildren, too. Much more gratifying than anything I did in an office.

ricpic said...

I make all my meals from scratch. That's not a boast, it's the only way to eat healthy and tasty. Which means I probably spend about as much time in the kitchen as my grandmother when she was cooking for herself and my grandfather, not when she was cooking for her husband and four kids. That said, I dispute the 30 hour a week claim for her. Because cooking from scratch you can come up with a perfectly decent hot meal in 30 minutes, often less. So let's say an hour and a half per day, which comes to ten hours per week, not thirty.

bagoh20 said...

I think the counters are too high. Once you get your woman up on there, you need a stool to stand on to get everything level and workable........

Oh you're talking about cooking. Nevermind.

Chip Ahoy said...

Children project for Halloween:

With Children, open Google Images and search:
[lion face]
[tiger face]
[bear face]
[giraffe face]
[monkey face]
{eagle face]
[what have you face]

Observe reactions and print favorite faces.

Draw over, color, mark up, attach things, glitter, feathers, lint, fuzz, whatever.

Cut out and Attach strings for masks.

Children become masked animals for the rest of the day. It's amazing how readily they accept their new identities self-selected. Whatever comes up they stay in character. Go shopping, stay in character, go to McDonalds stay in character, go to Church stay in character, Museum in character.

Steg said...

Low counters and sinks have annoyed me for years. When I buy my house and redesign it to my standards, there will be a counter and sink for tall, and then the mirror image of it for short.

Also the consumer grade lawn mowers. This year I made a jig out of scrap wood that extends the lawn mower handle up 1.5 feet, where I can now push it while walking upright. Liberated from the hunch! I was annoyed that day because I had to do 30 minutes of work I hadn't planned on. Yet in retrospect, it is liberating and invigorating knowing you can customize anything to fit your life. We shape the world to fit us, while adapting to the world around us. A double fist approach.

Jim in St Louis said...

I wonder how much of the time reduction is due to food producers packaging changes in the last x years. For Grandma a chicken dinner started with getting the hatchet, now a chicken dinner starts with a cleaned and plucked and butchered bird.

Jim in St Louis said...

(my dirty confession....I sometimes buy chicken feet at Soulard Market, the guy who sells them tells me I'm the only white person he knows who buys them)

Trooper York said...

ricpic is entirely correct. I also cook every meal with fresh ingredients every day. Although we have certain dietary requirements it takes a little longer. About an hour a day.

bagoh20 said...

I live on coffee and turkey sandwiches. My lady only eats pizza and cake. All we need is a toaster oven, a knife and two forks. I don't even have a regular oven in my kitchen. Who has time for cooking with all this blog bullshit to do?

bagoh20 said...

We do have a garden with eggplants, pumpkins, tomatoes, artichokes, green beans, swiss chard, chives, zucchini, cilantro, peppers, and pineapple. All still producing at this late date thanks to the great weather this fall. I don't cook any of it. I eat it right off the vine like a proper neanderthal man. Stay close to your roots.

Trooper York said...

ripic is also entirely correct that the only way to eat healthy is to cook yourself with fresh ingredients every day.

When you eat out they just put way too much salt and other unnecessary chemicals like MSG to make it taste great but kill you quicker.

Trooper York said...

You are a lying sack of shit bags. I bet you cook all the time. You grill those delicious veggies and some meat like any self respecting American.

Cut the crap.

edutcher said...

I think we forget how much work there is in running a house.

Women got old before their time as late as the 40s.

How something like sewing by hand (especially by candlelight or a kerosene lamp) can kill your eyesight or washing clothes in a tub with a scrubbing board was murder on your back.

Like the Greens and their desire to have us, but not them, live in the 18th century, the feminuts can bitch all they want, but, without all that sexist engineering, women would still be in the home doing the stuff necessary to survive.

bagoh20 said...

I do have a grill, but that's not cooking. That's just playing with my two favorite things fire and meat.

Sometimes I'll get an order of MSG delivered.