The Extra Woman Page 13
But that was not why it sold. During the fall of 1936, Bobbs-Merrill’s marketing department pushed The Joy of Cooking alongside its other big title, Live Alone and Like It, as handbooks to help women weather tough times. The books were frequently reviewed together on the women’s pages of newspapers, but their similarities ran deeper than their overlapping audience. Both Irma Rombauer and Marjorie Hillis drew on their own experience to impart advice, and both made it clear that they and their readers were not so different. Irma had battled Bobbs-Merrill in order to maintain her distinctive “action method” of recipe writing, in which ingredients are highlighted as needed in the method, rather than assembled in potentially intimidating lists at the start of the recipe. She also persuaded them to leave in her chatty headnotes, which enticed the reader to try out a new dish and reassured her that it would turn out well. For home cooks, the joy of Joy lay in these notes, which made the book feel like an invitation to experiment in the kitchen alongside an encouraging friend. Mrs. Rombauer and Miss Hillis did not claim to be experts, and they did not condescend. Instead, they spoke frankly and with humor about making the best of life at home, even if it looked nothing like the life their readers had once expected.
The Joy of Cooking acknowledged that its reader was operating on a tighter budget and with less help than ever before, yet it generally assumed that she was feeding a family, had no job outside the home, and could put time and thought into stretching her grocery budget and preparing her meals. For the Live-Aloner supporting herself, who might have had little more than a hot plate on which to exercise her culinary talents, the goals were different: speed, simplicity, economy, and with luck, a little flavor. Joy—and Joy—could wait. But that didn’t mean that Irma Rombauer couldn’t lend a hand. In 1939 she published Streamlined Cooking, a title that proclaimed the modern spirit of a book that promised “Good Meals in 30 Minutes,” using “Canned, Packaged, or Frosted Food.” We often think of the 1950s as the heyday of these sorts of convenience foods, but they were already well established as cooking shortcuts by the 1930s, although cooks were usually urged to dress them up with fresh ingredients—at least, if they wanted to impress guests.
Streamlined Cooking was published shortly after The Working Girl Must Eat, and also aimed to help this species of cook, “the business woman who hurries home from the office to prepare the evening meal.” But in addition, it spoke to the upper-class lady of the house who needed to manage temporarily without a maid, as well as to “the camper, the trailer-dweller, [and] the vacationist in a summer cottage.” The meals in Streamlined Cooking were not going to show off anyone’s culinary prowess, whether for a perfect rib eye or a platter of cucumber sandwiches, as the book made it clear that streamlining was for out-of-the-ordinary scenarios, not regular cooking. By extension, it implied that the single woman’s nine-to-five life was similarly unusual and temporary, a reprieve before her real work of domesticity began. For a variety of reasons, including perhaps this implication that the recipes weren’t for “real” meals, Streamlined Cooking was “a terrible flop.”28
Books aimed at the busy female businesswoman rarely suggested that men might also find something useful in their pages. Streamlined Cooking did suggest that it might be of some use to the husband who had to make dinner because his wife was absent or sick, but if they did cook, men were supposed to look to entirely different guides. Although the working man must also eat, it was assumed he did not eat boned trout. Midcentury cookbooks like 1937’s For Men Only, by Achmed Abdullah and John Kenny, worked hard to reassure men that their masculinity would survive a stint in an apron. These books insisted that a man only ever cooked as a hobby, preferably over a grill, and that when he did, the results were reliably superior to his wife’s daily efforts. His tastes were assumed to run to the bloody, boozy, and bold, and away from such feminine treats as cakes, whipped cream, and garnishes of any kind.29
In the bestselling 1943 edition of Joy, however, several of the economically minded recipes from Streamlined Cooking were successfully repackaged. They looked newly appealing as responses to wartime rationing that restricted the availability of sugar, butter, and meat. Along with the very similar, postrationing update of this edition, published in 1946, it was this version—appealing to both men and women, and written with an eye to convenience and economy—that cemented the book’s status as the kitchen bible for American households. It would retain that status through its multiple revisions well into the twenty-first century.
A Lady and Her Liquor
Corned Beef and Caviar made it clear that entertaining was not just a matter of food. With the exception of the occasional ladies-only affair of tea and sandwiches, the assumption throughout was that entertaining included cocktails, and possibly beer and wine too, depending on the menu. When Live Alone and Like It first appeared, three years after the repeal of Prohibition, it was no longer an act of rebellion for a single woman to keep her liquor cabinet well stocked. Indeed, according to Marjorie Hillis, it was a marker of a woman’s sophistication that she could offer her male and female visitors a glass of sherry, a Scotch, or a properly mixed old-fashioned. But the bar was no place for fashionable, feminine frills: “Worse, even, than the woman who puts marshmallows in a salad is the one who goes in for fancy cocktails,” she warned. The recipes Marjorie offered her reader were brief and bulletproof, for straightforward drinks like martinis and Manhattans. “Do not try to improve on them,” she ruled. “You can’t.”30 But that didn’t mean that women’s freedom to drink was universally accepted. On her Live Alone lecture tour, Marjorie told the story of receiving the whole of chapter nine, “A Lady and Her Liquor,” in the mail, after it had been “torn out by an irate reader, who had scrawled over each page, ‘delete,’ ‘delete,’ ‘delete.’ ”31
Marjorie was less sanguine about women going to bars alone, advising her readers to avoid them in favor of a lounge or restaurant if they really wanted a drink. In the introduction to her memoir Drinking with Men, an ode to the joys of becoming a bar regular, writer Rosie Schaap finds it “remarkable—and a little depressing” that so many women, even eighty years on, have internalized the warning from Live Alone and Like It that drinking alone in public will make them look “forlorn and conspicuous.”32 But as with many questions of “etiquette for a lone female” in Marjorie’s book, this one has more to do with personal comfort than public judgement. In a bar, she argues, a woman alone can’t be assured of peace and quiet, can’t fully control how she’s seen or treated, can’t be mistress of her domain. A cautionary tale from her column, about the “young lady who didn’t know when to stop,” harshly recounts how drunkenness destroys a woman’s appearance and composure: “her features slip and blur, her hair straggles, her eyes look vacant, and her dress doesn’t seem to set quite right.” It’s the girl’s vacant eyes that are really the sign that things have gone too far—she’s all body, no brain, and is no longer in control of her situation or herself.33
At the height of Prohibition, when The New Yorker paid the young Vassar graduate and minister’s daughter Lois Long to be its nightlife correspondent, the writer became emblematic of the flapper, in her loose dresses and looser morals. Flappers took very little seriously, especially drinking, and if they got married—as Long did, in 1927, to The New Yorker’s cartoonist Peter Arno—that marriage would be tumultuous, boozy, and probably short-lived (Long went to Reno for a divorce in 1931). In her nostalgic 1940 ode to that “foolhardy, collegiate, naive era” of Prohibition, Long remembered—or didn’t, quite—nights drinking hard in the unlikeliest places, like the “respectable maiden-ladies’ hotel” that “had a roaring bar in the basement, which you entered through a secret door in the back of the coatroom.” Her stories regularly featured narrow escapes from police raids, when she was forced to scramble out back doors and sprint down alleyways in her evening gown. “You were thought to be good at holding your liquor in those days if you could make it to the ladies’ room without throwing up,” she recalled.34
While there was no going back to the teetotal past, the years after Prohibition’s repeal saw a widespread effort to restore order by curtailing and regulating women’s drinking. The major effort to retrain women’s behavior and reassert public morality happened through the all-important cultural force of the movies, compelled since 1934 to follow the restrictions of the Hays Code.35 In the early years of the Depression, the pressure to make movies morally improving—or at least not corrupting—struck the industry as a luxury for better times. Struggling studios and theater chains needed to pack in audiences, and tales of bloody murder and unbridled desire were reliably profitable. In 1930, the industry’s ad hoc, state-by-state system of self-censorship had theoretically been standardized under a code of conduct nicknamed for Will H. Hays, the religious Republican head of the MPPDA, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (renamed the Motion Picture Association of America, MPAA, in the 1940s). For its first four years, however, the Hays Code was essentially toothless. Its weakness was best embodied in the curves and wink of the most bankable star of that era: brash, busty, brazen Mae West, whose films cheerfully violated both the spirit and the letter of the Code, by mocking the law, celebrating sin, and displaying plenty of “lustful kissing” and “scenes of passion”—not to mention public intoxication.36
But by 1934, following the end of Prohibition and under pressure from Catholic groups threatening mass cinema boycotts, Hays and his office had had enough, and put pressure on the studios to enforce the code in earnest. Until the adoption of the MPAA ratings system in the 1960s, the code regulated what stories could be told and how, operating on three general principles: (1) that villains and sinners would not win the audience’s sympathy, (2) that laws of man or nature would not be ridiculed, and (3) that “correct standards of life” would be presented. These ambiguous principles were harder to enforce than the specific rules, which banned concrete elements like drug use, criminal acts, and disrespect of religion or the American flag. By far the longest list of taboos, however, was sexual. Movies in general were supposed to uphold “traditional” marriage, which meant that depictions of, or references to, homosexuality, interracial relationships, adultery, and prostitution were off-limits. Female independence was a particularly dangerous proposition. The single woman had to be brought into line, even if it was right at the end of a movie that had seemed, up to that point, to celebrate her freedom.
Directors therefore had to get creative if they wanted to push the boundaries of women’s lives and relationships on-screen. In the screwball romances of the late 1930s, women’s drinking often stood in for sexual indiscretion: drunk women misbehaving, and their regrets, allowed filmmakers to flirt with taboos and hint at what might happen if they followed their desires. In The Philadelphia Story, champagne flows through the story like a mischevious sprite, whose role is to reveal the characters’ true desires. The film was one of a popular minigenre of so-called comedies of remarriage, in which a formerly divorced couple wittily reunites, often after the woman has tried a little Live-Alone and found she doesn’t like it. Cary Grant made the role of the repentant, sometimes reformed husband his own in a string of such movies: 1937’s The Awful Truth and 1940’s His Girl Friday, as well as The Philadelphia Story, in which the remarriage depends on the woman’s drunkenness and the man’s abstinence. In a silent prologue, Grant’s C. K. Dexter Haven is shown leaving the mansion he shares with his wife Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and raising a fist against her, before reconsidering and merely pushing her to the ground. When the story begins in earnest, two years later, Tracy is about to marry the uptight George Kittredge, when Haven reappears to win her back. We’re told that it was drink that drove the couple apart—or rather, Tracy’s Puritan intolerance for her husband’s “deep and gorgeous thirst.” Haven says that it would be good for Tracy’s “foot to slip a little,” by drinking too much herself, in order to humanize her and make her more sympathetic to his weakness—as well as to conquer her sexual frigidity (in one of the film’s most vicious speeches, the hero accuses his ex-wife of belonging to “a peculiar class of the American female—the married maidens,” who are too proud and prudish to have sex with their husbands). The perfectly proper, upwardly mobile George is content to worship at Tracy’s feet, but her father, Haven, and Jimmy Stewart’s infatuated Mike all conspire to shake her down from her pedestal. When Tracy and Mike escape a lavish party the night before the wedding—she in a watery Adrian gown with sequined epaulettes, and he in tie and tails, bottle of champagne in hand—it’s a scene that places the society queen and the struggling writer on a newly equal footing through the leveling power of drink. Their ardent conversation, dance, kiss, and late-night swim stand in for a sexual dalliance. The next day, interrogated by Tracy’s precocious little sister, the hungover pair are forced to clarify exactly what happened. Although at first she’s horrified that Mike carried her to bed, Tracy is then even more incensed to learn that he left her there alone: Was she so unattractive? “You were very attractive,” he protests, “but you were also a little the worse—or better—for wine, and there are rules about that.” George, the middle-class stick-in-the-mud, is shocked by the rest of the group’s ability to shrug off Tracy’s wild night. “A man expects his wife to behave herself, naturally,” he protests, leaving Haven to twist his words in the rejoinder, “A man expects his wife to behave herself naturally.” George leaves when Tracy refuses to swear off drinking forever (“there was something about that girl, that Miss Pommery ’24, I quite liked,” she admits) and her ex-husband slips in as a substitute groom. Where the proper Tracy Lord was an ice queen, Miss Pommery ’24 is flesh, blood, and feminine sympathy.
The idea that a little too much wine could soften a proud woman into a loving wife was one way in which the drinking culture—at least in upper-class circles—expanded to include women. After repeal, the demon drink was transformed into a symbol of style and modernity, shared by men and women, like the living room of the modern home. The cocktail, which in the 1920s had been a way to sweeten the bite of bootleg booze, became instead a chic accessory, thanks to figures like Harry Craddock, the British-born bartender who made his name shaking up drinks at New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel until Prohibition chased him back to London and the Savoy. After presiding over the bar there for several years, he published The Savoy Cocktail Book: “A complete compendium of the Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Slings, Shrubs, Smashes, Fizzes, Juleps, Cobblers, Fixes and other Drinks known and vastly appreciated in this year of grace 1930, with sundry notes of amusement and interest concerning them together with subtle observations upon wines and their special occasions.” After repeal, an American edition reproduced Craddock’s recipes and notes in an effort to establish “proper” versions of old and new concoctions, and to instruct readers on how to prepare and serve them. The Savoy Cocktail Book promised to reestablish class boundaries after the crash had smashed them, offering an “elucidation of the manners and customs of people of quality in a period of some equality.” Knowing how to mix drinks, and how to hold them, became a convenient way to identify “people of quality.”
Although she sounded like an old hand by the time she wrote chapter nine of Live Alone, “A Lady and Her Liquor,” Marjorie Hillis was in fact fairly new to drinking. In an edition of her syndicated column titled “How Many Martinis?” she explained, “I am a minister’s daughter and 10 years ago I had never had a drink.” The only taste of alcohol she’d had by the time her parents died was a sip of wine or beer on European vacations, “taken in the same sight seeing spirit as art galleries and cathedrals.” The column is yet another hint of the abject failure of Prohibition, if a practically teetotal minister’s daughter dates her drinking life to around 1926, right in the middle of the great dry experiment. Ten years on, “I am an orphan and a business woman, and my cellar (under the shelf in the kitchenette) is as well stocked as my larder.” Legal or otherwise, drinking represented liberation from old social and familial constraints.
For a single woman it was also a statement of financial independence: stocking a home bar wasn’t cheap. To invite guests and not offer a highball “seems like another form of sponging”—the worst social crime to be found in Live Alone and Like It. But it wasn’t just a commodity—alcohol was cultural currency as well. “I like to be able to discuss the comparative merits of tequila and vodka along with those of Mussolini and Hitler or Duranty and Hemingway,” Marjorie wrote. The true Live-Aloner should be able to hold court freely with men, whether the conversation turned to dictators or distillation.37
The majority of cocktail writers, then as now, were men—some bartenders like Harry Craddock, and others writers who cultivated bon vivant reputations, infusing their books with jet-setting glamour and masculine authority. The flapper, reckless goddess of the speakeasy, was a consumer of drinks, not a connoisseur. But in a post-Prohibition world, women would have a new role to play, as public regulators of drinking and drunkenness. As Americans prepared themselves to welcome alcohol back into polite society, several new guides set out to teach the finer points of domestic imbibing. A pair of books by women took the lead in setting their readers on the responsible course. Virginia Elliott’s Quiet Drinking, published in 1933, was a restrained contrast to her previous, coauthored book Shake ’Em Up!, published “in the 12th year of Volstead, 1930.” Quiet Drinking looked beyond the riotous cocktail, offering advice on beer and wines, as well as the best food to serve to soak up the booze—a notion quite alien in the speakeasy years. Choosing a favorite beer, according to Elliott, was a distinctly sober business: “Buy a bottle of each beer that is sold in your locality, then sit down calmly and seriously and taste them, chewing a bite of bread between each brand, until you find one most pleasant to your taste.”38 There is something appealingly purist about this almost monastic pursuit of flavor, which pays no attention to advertising or branding and trusts only in the individual taste of the drinker. Wine was an even greater mystery, since Prohibition had wiped out a nation’s oenophile expertise, and as the author firmly decrees, “Consuming glass after glass of red ink in a speakeasy or Italian restaurant is not wine drinking.”39 Unless the reader has lived abroad, or belongs to a fortunate family that amassed a serious wine cellar before Prohibition was enacted, his or her wine knowledge was assumed to be nonexistent. At the time the book was published, anyone wanting to embark on the extensive (and expensive) business of wine self-education still had to persuade his or her doctor to write a prescription for a case.