Contradictory Cookbooks

Contradictory Cookbooks offers a historical exploration of how women merged their voluntary, professional, and political interests through DIY cookbook publishing. Although cookbooks are often associated with the domestic and traditional, Barth reveals that the production of community cookbooks in the second half of the twentieth century was increasingly taken up by working women, women involved in student and civil rights movements, and women fighting for the cause of second-wave feminism. Barth reveals why, at a time that perhaps seems surprising and unlikely, women from a broad range of backgrounds and interest-groups produced these culinary texts. Drawing on hundreds of American community cookbooks as well as archival research from American women’s organizations, Contradictory Cookbooks argues that, through the production and sale of fundraising cookbooks, women found a means to bridge sometimes contradictory aspects of their lives.