Women and wine
Farley, who blogs at Wine Outlook, was discussing a waiter consulting her non-wine expert boyfriend on dinner drinks rather than herself, when she was obviously doing the actual deciding and was (less obviously, perhaps) a wine expert. On the same day on the other side of the world a friend of mine blogged that women had all the nice stereotypes and that feminism basically sucks. I’ll argue the stereotype thing with him offline, but the two are really handy in terms of pointing towards assumptions with strong historical foundations, assumptions that inform our everyday lives so profoundly that we often don’t even know they’re happening. Things like who cooks in a family, who keeps track of what groceries need buying, who serves at dinner when there are guests and who stays put and keeps the guests amused.
There’s also who gets remembered for what.
There are two common English surnames that reflect female food industry professionals: Baxter (a woman baker) and Brewster (a woman brewer). In historical novels bakers are usually male and brewsters are usually referred to with the less flattering designation of ‘alewife.’ Alewife is less flattering because in a bunch of literature alewives are described as argumentative louts. It’s also a kind of fish, which is not really relevant (unless an alewife cooks an alewife for dinner)? Two important surnames and we relegate them to the sidelines.
If that doesn’t intrigue you, try putting ‘wine’ and ‘women’ and ‘Medieval’ as search terms in Google. The major work that hits the top ten is actually about poetry from a male point of view (and I have that book and must blog it some day): studies on women and wine do not rank.
Google and surnames are historical sources. How we read the information and interpret it shows some very important stuff about how we bring the past into our own lives.
It’s all a matter of how we classify the past and the present. When we organise our memories and our group memories, what do we give priority to? Do we remember chefs (Escoffier, Taillevant) or Baxters? Do we treat men and women equally in our historical memory, or do we do what the wine waiter did in that restaurant, and assume that the male of the species will be our holder-of-key-knowledge.
The way we shape our remembrance of the past is the way we shape our present. Feminists and historians of particular groups aren’t saying “we want in” because of a case of benign neglect. They’re saying that it’s important that we reshape history because without this we’re stuck with injustices in the present: the body of material we use to base our judgements upon favours private householding for women and public approval for men. This doesn’t reflect human past so much as our way of looking at it.
Until we can get past the assumptions about women’s roles and men’s roles we can’t even begin to know a whole bunch of important historical issues, like the number of women soldiers in a given war, or the number of men who cooked for private joy.
If you can hang on til next March (Women’s History Month in Australia) I’ll do a series of posts on women in food history. If you want something before then (since it’s a long way away), just say and I’ll start talking about historiography and how we interpret our past. I was an historiographer before I turned to food history, and the biasses and underlying assumptions in everything from recipe books to service at a dining table are things I love to explore.
women, wine, food history, women’s history, remembering women, historical sources
June 3rd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
A great follow up post! I’m so glad I found your site through Farley’s blog. It sounds like you know the work of Judith Bennett–I’m a great fan of her work. And I’m trying to attach a picture of a women decanting wine from the medieval period for you. If it doesn’t go through please email me and I’ll send it to you. I think I might have to post, too.
It doesn’t look like it’s going to through, Gillian. I’ll send it to you.
June 4th, 2007 at 12:19 am
I never knew that about Brewsters and Baxters. It’s interesting how many assumptions we all make about gender roles every day without realizing it. I don’t understand why some people get upset when such assumptions are pointed out too them, and argue that the assumption is OK, because it’s “true.” The reality is women who don’t fit the stereotype are treated as exceptions. One stereotype that bothers me a lot is that women are somehow incapable of being great chefs, even though women are expected to do most of the home cooking.
June 4th, 2007 at 11:48 am
What a great historical analysis in relation to our current problems, Gillian. So many interesting points. I wonder when the chef versus cook issue really came to the forefront. And the look at/ abandonment of surnames.
But the thing I’ll really take from this post is that it doesn’t matter how it really is/was but how we find out about it, the importance placed upon the truth or the perception. If Google puts men before women in a search specifically about women, that illuminates gaping holes in the search results. And sheds an ugly light on society as a whole, I think.
June 4th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
[...] great discussion in my last post over women’s rights when it comes to wine (resulting in this interesting piece by Gillian), I can be as girly as the next [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 6:27 am
I’ll explore the chef/cook dichotomy sometime, I promise.
One of the major issues that we need to address is that getting angry doesn’t change things: it just annoys people. Understanding and explaining and reconfiguring our culture changes things. What the history gives, is a a path to understanding. What women who work with wine give, is the start of change in that industry. A million small steps and maybe there’ll be equality.
June 6th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Gillian, I agree that getting angry alone doesn’t change things. But voicing concerns can be the way to open up dialogue, and that does begin to change things. Too bad it may annoy some people, and certainly I don’t think that any of us are ranting or raving. Hopefully posts such as yours and Farley’s also makes people think, once the annoyance has passed. I would like to believe that we can build on the steps other women have made in the past so that someday a million steps won’t be needed to bring equality, but maybe only 500,000. Then 250,000. And so on.
October 6th, 2007 at 8:25 am
[...] act to follow. I sometimes talk about the higher meaning of food (you don’t have to click on this link, it’s basically to show that I occasionally have a brain and can almost reach platforms of [...]