The South and Cake Mix
A brief excerpt of a piece I wrote about the rise of cake mix in the South between 1930 – 1970.
Cake mix became implicated in the continued gendering of the woman as domestic cook in the 1950s. A cookbook boom introduced larger sections devoted to desserts. The most important target audience, however, was teenagers. Most women that were cooking in the home had been taught to cook by their mothers in the frame of the domestic science movement. Their mothers had most likely learned actively observing and participating in the cooking in their home growing up. The rising middle class allowed for more leisure activity for children and less involvement in household duties. A focus on making cooking “fun” for girls rather than a “drudgery.” Neuhaus notes that “[m]ost cookbooks for children. . .consisted primarily of this kind of ‘predictable’ cooking from a mix, a box, or a can” (174). Cake mix and baking transitioned from being a skill learned through the previous generation to a novelty act involving fun and creativity. Moving forward, cooking with mixes and canned goods would be portrayed as a way to be artistic and creative within the domestic space.
As late as the 1960s, the need to keep women in the kitchen became more urgent, coincidentally at the same time the Civil Rights Act was signed. Using the newly developed technologies that would purportedly give a woman more free time, one advertising executive admitted that
. . .we have to liberate women to desire these new products. We help them rediscover that homemaking is more creative than to compete with men. This can be manipulated. We sell them what they ought to want, speed up the unconscious, move it along. The big problem is to liberate the woman not to be afraid of what is going to happen to her, if she doesn’t have to spend so much time cooking, cleaning (Friedan 227).
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Kelly E. Spivey 