Made from Scratch - Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth

Informationen zum Autor Jean Zimmerman Klappentext In this stunning celebration and reappraisal of the importance of "women's work," acclaimed journalist Jean Zimmerman poignantly addresses the tug that many Americans of the twenty-first century feel between our professional and private lives. With sharp wit and intelligence, she offers evidence that in the current domestic vacuum, we still long for a richer home life -- a paradox visible in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, in the continuing popularity of women's service magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Ladies' Home Journal -- whose combined circulation of over 17 million is nearly twice the combined circulation of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report -- and the booming business of restorations, where onlookers get a hands-on view of domestic life as it flourished in past centuries. This book is about the ways home traditions passed from one generation to the next -- baking a birthday cake from scratch, cherishing family heirlooms, or discovering the satisfaction of piecing a quilt -- sustain our souls, especially in our ever more processed, synthetic world, where we buy "homemade" goods and fail to see the irony in that. Made from Scratch tells the story of the unsung heroines of the hearth, investigating the history of female domesticity and charting its cultural changes over centuries. Zimmerman traces the lives of her own family's homemakers -- from her tiny but indomitable grandmother, who managed a farm, strangled chickens with her bare hands, and sewed all the family clothing, to her mother, who rejected her country upbringing yet kept a fastidious suburban home where the gender divide stayed firmly in place, to her own experiences as a wife and mother weaned on the Women's Movement of the 1970s, with its emphatic view that housework was a dirty word and that the domestic sphere was to be fled rather than cherished. In this book Zimmerman questions the unexamined trade-off we have made in a shockingly brief time span, as we've "progressed" from home-raised chickens to frozen TV dinners to McNuggets from the food court at the mall. What is lost when we no longer engage, as individuals and as a community, in the ancient rituals of food, craft, and shelter? Leseprobe Made from Scratch CHAPTER 1 Heirlooms MY GRANDMOTHER, born in 1913, was the last of the old-fashioned American homemakers. A farm wife, she lived her whole life in small-town western Tennessee, midway between Memphis and Nashville, near the border of Kentucky. Her family was close-knit. My grandmother was raised next door to her own grandparents, catty-corner from the house in which her future husband grew up, and together my freshly married grandparents settled on that same block, first in the little house where my mother was born and then in a classic sprawling Victorian conveniently situated next door to my grandfather’s first business, a filling station. Not a soft, big, maternal type, my grandmother was bird-small yet not breakable. She was fashionable, never dowdy. Yet despite her stature and her style, my grandmother embraced the heavy labor of farm life. My grandparents planted fields of feed corn and cotton, soybeans, and okra on farmland outside of town. At the farm, coarse-haired hogs rooted in a pen, and up a rutted muddy road grew a vast peach orchard. Summers, my mother and her sisters and brother helped the field hands harvest strawberries, hunching on their hands and knees over the easily damaged fruit. All of the picking was hard: fuzzy okra pricked the fingertips, and cotton sat like a boulder in the canvas bag slung over the shoulder. Standing sentry behind a big wooden table, my grandmother would count the slatted produce carriers as the pickers brought in each harvest...

Product details

• Authors: Jean Zimmerman
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.07.2012
• EAN: 9780684869605
• ISBN: 978-0-684-86960-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: FREE PR
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories