POLITICIZING THE KITCHEN

 

 

 

The kitchen is the heart of domesticity; the home of the home where food and warmth are enjoyed by family members. But even the kitchen—this private realm in our life—can be part of everyday politics, albeit in different ways.

 

The Slave Chamber

Before modern technologies were developed for the household, the kitchen was the drudgery of domestic labor; labor which was generally associated with women’s role. Not surprisingly, the Russians in the Soviet era once viewed the kitchen as a slave chamber for women. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the kitchen was part of the house that must be rid of for the full emancipation of women. Public dining spaces replaced the kitchen to free women from the derogatory labor and toil of the kitchen and to give women time for self-growth and development—more time to read and explore literature and the arts.

When these public dining places didn’t take off too well and the growing industry brought more people to the cities, the government set up communal apartments for several families to live in. Called kommunalka, these living spaces had a shared kitchen. The kitchens in these homes were public space, where each family sharing the apartment cooked their meals in.

 

Russian communal kitchen (NPR)

 

Among the pots and pans and laundry of all the families living in the apartment, the kitchen was not the best place to be sitting down to enjoy your coffee. Not just because it was a potential hotbed for occupants to engage in conflict, perhaps over a missing kettle, but it was also a dangerous place to carry out the wrong conversation. In the communal kitchen, you would have to watch what you say, as information can be passed on to the government.

 

A Kitchen of One’s Own

Beginning in 1950s and '60s, in the rush to provide housing for the increasing population, low ceiling two-bedroom apartments were built for the masses—dubbed the Khrushchyovka, after the Soviet leader. This time, they were built for individual families, with their very own bathroom and kitchen too. As extended families of three generations cramped into these small apartments, there was barely space for family members to eat together. But at least they had their very own kitchen.

With families having their own privacy, the kitchen did not become any safer. Being a private space, the government needed to take an even closer watch of the kitchen. Agents were watching and tapping kitchens.

However threatening, families welcomed guests into their small kitchens, they were the place where conversations about politics and the arts took place. Between the walls of the kitchen, underground self-published literature (samizdat) was shared and read. It was also a place for family and friends to listen to banned music, such as jazz and rock and roll. When a group of people hung out in the kitchen like this, it was considered a form of dissident activity.

 

Khrushchyovka apartment (NPR)

 

Ironically, while freedom of art and freedom of expression were topics discussed at the kitchen table, the discrimination that Soviet women were facing were topics left undiscussed.

While after the revolution Russian women obtained legal, political, and economic rights, it was not long after Stalin came into power that he brought back the traditional gender division of labor. Women were defined as mother, wife, and communist. Women’s condition eroded. Between the neighboring walls of communal apartments, it was no secret that women were victims of abuse.

In 1979, a group of women (Tatiana Mamonova, Tatiana Goricheva, Natalia Malakhovskaya, and Yuliya Vesnesenskaya) self-published the controversial almanac Woman and Russia that revealed what women really faced in the Soviet Union: the double standard as proletariats and as wives and mothers, unequal pay, domestic violence, poor conditions of maternity clinics, and the state’s poor childcare quality. However, the dissident circles did not care to discuss these issues at their kitchen tables and it was not long after the almanac’s circulation that the KGB were after the authors, forcing them to flee Russia. 

 

The Dishwasher

Twenty years before Woman and Russia was written, in 1959, during an American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had a heated debate with US Vice President Richard Nixon about women and kitchen design—one which will be remembered years on as part of Cold War history. Nixon proudly introduced the kitchen model of the “typical American house” and then particularly took the dishwasher as an example which he might have thought would represent women’s liberation in the US.  

 

Khrushchev and Nixon at Sokolniki Park in Moscow, 1959 (Time)

 

While pointing at a dishwasher Nixon goes on to say,

 “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.”

In response, Khrushchev said, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism.”

Nixon replied, “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.”

 

The dishwasher conversation between the two world leaders—dubbed “the kitchen debate”—is quite telling. Even before a UN women’s convention existed, women’s wellbeing was already some sort of a benchmark for assessing a political system. 

So if the Soviet Union had wanted to liberate women by getting rid of the kitchen, the US had opt for revolutionizing the kitchen. After World War II, women in America were encouraged to stay at home to make way for the employment of men returning from war. During this time, the old-fashioned American kitchen began experiencing a dramatic change. Listening to what housewives felt about their kitchen, in the 1940s, architects, engineers, and home economics specialists began building modern kitchens. Using new technology, kitchens were turned into workshops to make cooking and washing convenient, less time consuming, and to give women freedom from drudgery. The architect of the successful suburban houses of the 1950’s, Alfred Levitt, was quoted to say: “Thanks to the number of appliances in our house, the girls will have three hours to kill every afternoon.” 

 

Watch 1949 film from the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics: A Step-Saving Kitchen. 

 

 

Levitton homes, New York (Pinterest)

 

With the new technologies aimed to boost efficiency and reduce domestic labor time, especially for women, couples could operate independently of extended family members. This was the time of the rise of the postwar nuclear family with the male breadwinner/housewife gender roles, from what advertisers and women’s magazines created the image of the postwar white middle-class housewife. 

 

Watch a feature from General Electric: It Happened in the Kitchen, Part 1 - ca. 1941.

 

Although as a housewife a woman toils with unpaid labor daily, in the capitalist system Nixon was promoting, this was not considered demeaning. Her devotion to her family was what makes up the American family values of the time. As scholars have observed, US Cold War propaganda heavily focused on the family and national security where the values of the ideal Western family were expected to sell democracy and capitalism abroad through the image of prosperity that the ideal family suggested.

 

Beyond the Kitchen

Interestingly, just four years after the kitchen talk with the Soviet leader—where Nixon attempted to use the domestic sphere to indicate the improvement of women’s life in the US—Betty Friedan's research revealed the contrary. Her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) exposed what was not communicated over the kitchen table: the unhappy white middle-class housewife’s discontent with domestic life.

 

 

Roger Wilkerson, Suburban Legend (Pinterest)

 

And in contrary to what Khrushchev may have thought about communism’s attitude towards women, Soviet women faced discrimination in the private and public sphere and this fact was even overlooked by dissident circles. Banned 40 years ago, the self-published Woman and Russia was recently in the Leningrad Feminism 1979 exhibition. (Its Moscow venue had experienced delay by the COVID-19 epidemic). The exhibition allows us to hear the once silenced voices of women who criticized the Soviet Union’s superficial liberation of women. These were the voices denied at the kitchen table.

 

Top picture photo credit: Jess Bailey (Unsplashed)

Sources

Friedan, Betty (1973) ‘Up from the Kitchen Floor.’ NY Times <https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/04/archives/up-from-the-kitchen-floor-kitchen-floor.html> [22 August 2020].

GeoHistory (2015) The Evolution and Dissolution of the Soviet Kitchen <https://geohistory.today/soviet-kitchen/> [5 July 2020].

Krasner, Barbara (2014) ‘The Nuclear Family and Cold War Culture of the 1950s.’ Academia <https://www.academia.edu/9926751/The_Nuclear_Family_and_Cold_War_Culture_of_the_1950s> [21 December 2019].

Levittown (2003) Building the Suburban Dream <http://statemuseumpa.org/levittown/three/kitchen.html> [22 August 2020].

NPR (2014) How Soviet Kitchens Became Hotbeds of Dissent and Culture: The Salt. <https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how-soviet-kitchens-became-hotbeds-of-dissent-and-culture> [5 July 2020].

Peacock, Margaret (2016) ‘Cold War Consumption and the Marketing of Childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950–1960.’ Journal of Historical Research in Marketing Vol. 8 No. 1: 83–98. <https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-05-2015-0015>.

Roache, Madeline (2019) ‘Is Capitalism or Communism Better for Women? How the Kitchen Debate Gave a New Meaning to the Cold War “Home Front”. Time <https://time.com/5630567/kitchen-debate-women/> [16 August 2020].

The Calvert Journal (2020) The Story Behind the 70s Samizdat that Launched Late Soviet Feminism <https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11906/woman-and-russia-feminist-zine-samizdat> [16 August 2020].

The Kitchen Debate-transcript 24 July 959 Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev U.S. Embassy, Moscow, Soviet Union <https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/1959-07-24.pdf> [16 August 2020].

The Kitchen Sisters (2020) Communal Kitchens <http://www.kitchensisters.org/hidden-kitchens/communal-kitchens/> [5 July 2020].

United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Library (n.d.) Step-Saving Kitchens <https://nalgc.nal.usda.gov/step-saving-kitchens> [22 August 2020].

THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN FAMILY IN THE DUTCH EAST INDIES

It is interesting how an old painting can provide a snapshot of the past and make history come alive. Taylor (2006) has perfectly demonstrated this fact through his observation of the work of Dutch painter, Jacob Coeman, titled “Pieter Cnoll and His Family” (1665). The painting (above) shows Cnoll, a Dutch senior merchant in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), with his Eurasian (Dutch-Japanese) wife Cornelia van Nijenrode, their children, and their servants in the fading background. The painting provides us with a glimpse of the social relations within the Dutch colony during the time and the background to the political and gendered context.

Sex, Power, and Concubinage

The social relations reflected in Coeman’s painting illustrate the years of colonialism and imperialism that had taken place in the Dutch East Indies. Policies that regulate social relations, including race and gender relations, were put in place in order to support the political and economic domination of the colonial state. The regulation of gender and sexual relations, as discussed below, had played an important role in efforts to establish a superior western culture and secure power. The United East India Company (VOC, 1602–1799) and later the Dutch government, continuously adjusted gender-related policies and regulations to the changing goals of the colonial state. 

 

In the 17^th century, due to the lack of European women in the East Indies, many VOC officials and officers practiced concubinage—the bondage of indigenous women, where under cohabitation, these women (referred to as nyai) worked to provide sexual and domestic services to VOC officials or officers and other Europeans. 

"The painting provides us with a glimpse of the social relations within the Dutch colony during the time and the background to the political and gendered context."

For women who were concubines to high ranking Dutch officials, this relation was a means to acquire economic mobility, as they were awarded with money, clothing, and jewelries. However, children from these relationships were not legally recognized by their father and the colonial state (Republika, 2016). For the VOC government, the Eurasian children of the concubines manifested the taboo of interracial sexual relationships.

The VOC government, particularly under the Governor-General and founder of Batavia (now Jakarta), Jan Pieterszoon Coen, had a conservative view of extramarital relationships and a discriminative stance toward interracial sexual relationships. The latter, in particular, was perceived as weakening the colonial government. In 1620, in an attempt to control these sexual relationships, Coen issued a prohibition of concubinage and launched a policy to bring single Dutch women to Batavia to become prospective wives. The policy lasted for about ten years and raised the number of marriages of the Dutch people in Batavia but was unsuccessful in curbing the practice of concubinage (Bosma and Raben, 2008). With the changing views of subsequent leaders, the practice of concubinage continued to be facilitated throughout the 18^th century. 

Family Meal, Jan Steen (between circa 1658 and circa 1666)

The Western Family and the Ethical Policy

Women and the family were seen as playing an important role in maintaining political power by perpetuating the colonizer and colonized dichotomy as well as raising the superiority of western values and civilization. This was clearly reflected in the migration policies that targeted women in the 18^th century and until the end of Dutch occupation.

In the 18^th century, the VOC government placed restrictions on Dutch women immigrating to the Dutch East Indies. Many of the women who previously came to Batavia were from the Dutch lower class and in the eyes of the colonial government did not exhibit the image of the ideal “respectable woman” of western society commonly represented by women of higher class. So except for male Dutch high officials, other men were not allowed to bring their wife and family to the East Indies (Tung 2011). 

Under the Dutch government, the second half of the 19^th century saw a western style capitalist economy developing in the Dutch East Indies where agricultural, trading, mining, and extraction companies were founded to exploit corps and natural resources (Brill.com, 2016). Migration policies during this time were less rigid towards Dutch women who wanted to enter the East Indies. With the economic expansion, the government was seeking for long term occupation of the region and needed the strong presence of European families in the Dutch East Indies. Women were then coined the custodian of welfare and supporter of colonial men (Tung, 2011). 

"Policies that regulate social relations, including race and gender relations, were put in place in order to support the political and economic domination of the colonial state."

Entering the 20^th century, with the technological advancement in Europe, the Dutch government saw the need to modernize and transfer efficiency to its colonies. This was a way to mark their power, success, and prestige as a colonial state. In order to achieve this transition to modernization, attempts were made by the colonial government to secure control over the population by increasing the number of Dutch families in the East Indies. Modernization for the government also meant reaching a level  where superior European values ruled over the local values. To strengthen western values, stable Dutch middle-class families were needed to end the current social promiscuity and populate the East Indies.

To achieve its economic and political objectives, the Dutch government lifted family restrictions and sponsored Dutch families to migrate to and start a new life in the plantations of Sumatra. The Dutch empire also reopened its gate to single Dutch women who wanted to settle in the East Indies. Before departure there were courses in the Colonial School for Girls and Women (founded in 1920) that a Dutch woman had to take to ensure that she would adapt easily to her new home in the East. These courses were mainly on cooking and cleaning, as these Dutch women will not only be doing these chores in their new home, but through culinary and domestic lifestyle, they were expected to bring along a set of western values to transfer to the colony (Brill.com, 2016). With the arrival of these new modern women who were sent to be agents of change, came the strengthening of the Dutch middle-class ideology in the East Indies.

School for indigenous girls

The 20^th century saw a more liberal attitude towards women’s role and the education of the indigenous people. This was the period of the ethical policy where education was made available for indigenous people. Schools for indigenous women were also established. This era produced middle-class educated local women’s political groups which were critical of the local tradition of the family and marriage institutions. One of the issues they advocated was the elimination of polygyny (Locher-Scholten, 2000). This was of course in line with the colonial government’s agenda of making the western nuclear family and monogamy the norm in the East Indies. 

In 1937, with the support of a number of local women’s groups, the colonial government launched the draft of Ordnance 1937 which required the marriage institution to be monogamous. However, this draft was soon dropped as it raised so much opposition, first from Islamic groups and later from nationalist groups, causing the women’s groups to withdraw their support. Interestingly, according to Locher-Scholten (2000), this opposition emerged more as a nationalist reaction to colonial government intervention of local institutions rather than the support of polygyny itself.

The rise of the educated younger generation in the East Indies and their awareness of right to sovereignty constituted a challenge for the Dutch Government in furthering their goals in the 20^th century. Moreover, the colonial government was disrupted during World War II with the Japanese occupation of the East Indies. The subsequent events that led to the independence of the East Indies ended all attempts by the Dutch to reclaim power over the region. In 1949, after plans to reopen, the women’s schools which aimed to send Dutch women on the task of modernizing a colony finally closed its doors for good. 

The 20th century saw the rise of women's political groups

Gender and Colonialization

Coeman’s painting of Cnoll and his family provides the backdrop against the economic and political power the VOC had over the indigenous people and the reality of the racial and gender hierarchy, as well as the marginalization of the slaves who in the painting are standing in the shadows. However, the painting does not exhibit the western family and their moral values which the colonial government wished to present in the 18^th century and onwards. 

 

Gender relations have always been at the core of a culture’s moral values. Colonialization is not only about economic exploitation and political subordination, but also cultural hegemony, which aims to establish the superiority of the colonizer’s moral values. Thus, as shown in the Dutch East Indies case, the regulation of sexual relations, gender roles, and women’s mobility were adjusted around the economic, political, and hegemonic interests of the colonial state.

References

Bosma, Ulbe and Remco Raben (2008) Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500-1920 [online] <https://books.google.co.id/books/about/Being_Dutch_in_the_Indies.html?id=47wCTCJX9X4C&redir_esc=y> [31 May 2020].

Brill.com (2016) Women in the Netherlands East Indies, Parts 1–2 [online] <https://brill.com/view/package/9789004205369> [25 May 2020].

Locher-Scholten, Elsbeth (2000) Women and the Colonial State, Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies 1900–1942. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [online] <https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n2p0> [27 May 2020].

Republika (2016) ‘Kisah Nyai dan Pergundikan di Batavia.’ Bagian 2 [online] <https://republika.co.id/berita/nasional/umum/16/02/19/o2qyfh385-kisah-nyai-dan-pergundikan-di-batavia-bagian-2habis> [27 May 2020].

Taylor, Jean Gelman (2006) ‘Meditations on a Portrait from Seventeenth-Century Batavia.’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 23-41 [online] <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20072684> [26 May 2020].

Tung, Justin (2011) Gender Regulation in the Dutch East Indies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries [online] <https://justintung.com/community/gender-regulation-in-the-dutch-east-indies-in-19th-and-20th-centuries/> [26 May 2020].

Illustrations: Wikipedia, Pinterest