At the Kitchen Table: 1950s

Two historians of 20th century domesticity in Canada give you the dish on CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner.

Welcome back to part two of our mini-series reviewing CBC’s new show, Back in Time for Dinner!

 

Andrea’s Review

If I have to pick one theme for this week, it would have to be missed opportunities. Oy vey. There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s get started.

First things first, it’s important to talk about the difference between expectations and reality. So far as I can tell, the show’s producers appear to be using primarily manuals and guidebooks from the period as sources of information regarding standards and behaviour. Which is all fine and good. But in real life, people don’t always follow the rules. To use a modern example, while many of us spend waaay too much time on Instagram or Youtube watching beauty, crafting, or baking videos, few if any of us will ever actually attempt them ourselves. While it is important not to understate the impact that these ideals have on our lives, they don’t necessarily dictate our behaviour. In other words, human beings always have the ability to make choices in their lives, even when there are limited or only bad choices available. This is a concept that historians call “agency” — people are not simply passive recipients, but can and do accept, resist, transform, or subvert social norms.

This is a particularly important concept when we consider the 1950s. The dominant image that we have today of the 1950s is that of the “Stepford Wife,” with an emphasis on conformity and repression. Think Betty Draper, the Flintstones, and Pleasantville. But as many historians of both Canada and the United States have shown, the 1950s was a particularly dynamic decade. For instance, Tarah Brookfield has shown, in her book Cold War Comforts, that in spite of government pressure on women in particular to prepare their families and communities for a possible nuclear attack, Canadian women criticized the government’s existing civil defence plans for being unrealistic, raised concerns about the feasibility of fallout shelters, mobilized disarmament protests, organized the Mother’s Committee on Radiation Hazards, and participated in the Baby Tooth Study to halt the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.

But perhaps the best (and just most awesome ever) example of women’s agency in the 1950s comes from Valerie Korinek’s research on the “Mrs. Chatelaine” contest. I’m kinda cheating here, since the first Mrs. Chatelaine contest actually took place in 1960, but the women involved came of age in the 1950s, so I think it still applies. In essence, the Mrs. Chatelaine contest was an attempt by Chatelaine magazine to find Canada’s best homemaker. I won’t go into too much detail here (you should check out her article listed below!), but basically, the woman who won had to be a magician. In response to the contest, however, Beatrice Maitland of Chatham, New Brunswick wrote into the magazine and nominated herself as “Mrs. Slob 1961.” As she noted in her letter (I know you are tempted to skip block quotes, but seriously, you don’t want to miss this one):

Yesterday was the closing date for your Mrs. Chatelaine contest, but I didn’t enter. … I wish someone, sometime, would have a competition for “Mrs. Nothing!!” A person who isn’t a perfect housekeeper, a faultless mother, a charming hostess, a loving wife or a servant of the community. Besides being glamorous as a model, talented as a Broadway star and virtuous as a Saint. To start with my appearance is absolutely fatal… I am overweight, pear-shaped, and bow legged. Consequently, not having much to work on I don’t bother and cover it up with comfortable, warm old slacks…. Now, housework. Failure there to as I am a lousy housekeeper… Entertaining? Practically never… A game of cards or just talk with a few beers. No fancy food, drinks or entertainment….Meals? We prefer plain meat and potato-vegetable meals with no frills. For birthdays our children choose the dinner. What’s the menu? Usually hamburgers and chips. You can’t win. Make a fancy meal from a magazine and they look like they are being poisoned… The décor is middle English European junk shop, especially when the children start doing their homework. Community activities? I have always belonged to and worked with other organizations… but I have become so sick or and bored with meetings I quit. My philosophy as a home-maker – I guess that is, be happy, don’t worry. You do what you can with what you’ve got when you feel like it. Consequently I’m never sick and I’ve got no nerves or fears. That is poor me. So if you want to run a contest for “Mrs. Slob 1961” I would be happy to apply and would probably win hands down. Thank you for your enjoyable magazines and my apologies for taking up your time. (Roughing it in the Suburbs, 89)

What’s more, Chatelaine magazine actually printed the letter, as well as several additional supporting letters, with an apology:

You certainly did stir up a furor. I for one found it extremely interesting to realize what a great load of guilt that the magazine probably contribute as much as any medium to this feeling. Thank you for reminding us. (90)

So while I understand why Back in Time for Dinner emphasized the 1950s “quest for perfection,” it ultimately failed to capture the reality of life in the 1950s.

This brings me to my second concern, and that has to do with the difference between nostalgia and history. I’m pretty sure my head just about exploded when the show introduced Brenda Novak and Michale Brode, as “experts” because they happened to grow up in the 1950s. There may have even been shouting at the television screen. So what’s wrong with this scenario? I think that it is best explained by this exchange between Brenda, Michale, and Tristan, the mother in the family profiled in Back in Time for Dinner:

B: I can remember my mother, she would watch for my father. And the minute she saw my father, the kettle was on, and the tea was sitting on the table with cookies. Every day when he got home.

T: It’s sad.

[…]

B: You say it was sad, but

T: Sad. I think it’s very sad, it devalues women. I don’t want to be expected to serve my husband, that’s what I’m having a hard time with.

B: Really? [with a head tilt)

T: I honestly think that devalues women

M: Coming from the future, looking back, our parents grew into the roles and we kinda evolved along the way.

T: Mmhmm.

M: They got better and better, each generation.

B: People, they were happy, they were very happy.

M: Yeah.

T: I just feel there was a lot of pressure put on women to be perfect.

Tristan actually nails it here. Betty Friedan famously described this feeling of malaise as “The Problem That Has No Name” — the feeling of looking around and wondering “is this all?” While there were many women who were satisfied with their lives, there were many more who expressed feelings of loneliness, isolation, inadequacy, and oppression. As one woman noted, “I began to feel as if I were slowly going out of my mind. Each day was completely filled with child and baby care and keeping the house tidy and preparing meals. I felt under constant pressure” ( Reghr, 190). Tristan’s feelings, and, one of the highlights of the show, her daughter Jessica’s embroidered handkerchief with the statement “I hate this,” are more historically accurate than the two women introduced here as experts. Tristan later comments that she felt that she, Brenda, and Michale had romanticized the 1950s. And she is absolutely correct.

And this is why it’s important to talk to historians, not just people who experienced the past. While I absolutely do not want to suggest that Brenda and Michale’s experiences are inauthentic or incorrect, individuals who lived through a particular time period may not be able provide a critical perspective. For instance, say you hear about a car accident on the news. If you want to know what really happened, you don’t just talk to the person in the car accident. Instead, you turn on the news because you want to hear someone who has all (or at least more) of the facts, and can contextualize what happened. This is the difference between nostalgia and history: sentimentality vs. critical analysis. And what’s more, Michale applies a historical interpretation here that is not entirely correct. For some reason, members of the public have embraced the idea of historical relativism, the idea that we should not judge the past by the standards of the present.  While I agree that it is important to understand the past on its own terms, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical of the past. A recent example of this being the debates over renaming places named after Sir John A. Macdonald. Oppression and racism should be condemned, not excused as an artifact of their time periods. That’s because while history is the study of the past, the past cannot ever be truly divorced from the present. As both Brenda and Michale noted, the mannerisms they learned from their mothers have stayed with them. The same is true for all of us: like Jessica, I learned to set a table from my mother, and I still set the table the same way. We need to think critically about all aspects of our lives, particularly those that have become so ingrained that we no longer even question what they mean.

Since this has gone on quite a bit longer than I intended, I think I’ll stop here, and leave it up to Kesia!

 

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Kesia’s Review

I completely agree – this episode was full of missed opportunities. I am just left wanting so much more from this show in every area.

One of the biggest things that this show seems to be missing is a more complete portrayal of family and home life. I know, I know – “But, it’s about food, Kesia!” But food history is so much more complex than just women making food from recipes. Just to give you one example, before we even get to the point of having kitchen gadgets like electric juicers and can-openers and use of packaged foods, we have to have money for them. But the show never address what kind of job Aaron might have. He would have to be making a decent amount of money for the family to afford all of these new appliances right when they are available.

Ignoring this issue also means that a lot of the complex dynamics of the 1950s, particularly around household politics and power dynamics, gets left out. However, these are issues of particular importance to the period. Aaron seems to be mostly absent here, but there is substantial evidence that shows that husbands and wives negotiated purchases. For example, Gerard Bouchard’s article “Through the Meshes of the Patriarchy” suggested that rural husbands and wives made decisions related to their own tasks, but worked together to make decisions about larger purchases. Joy Parr also discusses this issue, and how in many families, it made more sense to purchase a wringer washer than an automatic washer, because the extra money could be used to purchase a radio or a television. These were often fraught discussions. Suzanne Morton also points out that an increased emphasis on household consumption increased the reliance of urban women on their husbands’ wages.

Another problem here is the show’s emphasis on change over continuity. While there are important differences between each of the decades, history is not as clear cut as we would like it to be. What’s more, in the interest of discussing these changes, the show makes several factual errors. For instance, the show asserts that in the 1950s housewives experienced a new “elevated role” that put them in charge of “all household buying.” However, Suzanne Morton’s Ideal Surroundings points to the importance of women in selecting the household items that set up a respectable home that reflected their status in the 1920s. Even taking a look at magazines from before the 1950s makes it clear that women were being advertised to and had purchasing power. None of this purchasing power, as the show seems to suggest, is that new.

It is easy to reduce the 1950s to a bunch of stereotypes, and one which the show seems to suggest is that most household purchases resulted from a “keeping up with the Joneses” dynamic. However, as Joy Parr’s Domestic Goods demonstrates, much of what women consumed was related not to leisure, but to their domestic labour. Further, Parr notes that advertisers and manufacturers used their gendered assumptions about women to sell them goods. “Back in Time for Dinner” has certainly shown the purchase of these new goods, however, they have not given any thought to how decisions to buy were “shaped by political processes and ethical judgements” and negotiated within the household economy (268). This is why including more about the family’s 1950s economic situation is important. Women were not just buying the newest items for the sake of being “trendy.” They thought about the functionality, style, and price of each item before they bought it.

One other aspect of this week’s episode that bothered me was their treatment of race and ethnicity. The CBC’s profile of the family says that their background “spans the globe” with Pakistani, First Nations, Austrian-Romanian, Scottish, and Irish. My sense is that this is an attempt to show how they are reflective of the overarching Canadian experience. Except, there was (and is) no singular Canadian experience. Scholars like Franca Iacovetta and Marlene Epp have explored the lives of post-World War II immigrants (Italians and Mennonites respectively) and it is very clear that the experiences of ethnic and racialized groups in the 1950s were different from the experiences of the suburban white middle class. And, let’s face it, the Campus family’s relatives were likely not experiencing this “happy 1950s” stereotype. Further, they also ignore the role that food played, as Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek talk about (in their Sisters or Strangers chapter) in cultural imperialism and curating a “good Canadian.”

I think the failure to address the cultural diversity of Canada on “Back in Time for Dinner” has also hindered the discussions of food’s importance to personal and cultural identity. As Andrea’s article about the Jewish Montreal cookbook, A Treasure for my Daughter, explains, ethnic groups used Cold War language to assert their Canadianness in cookbooks. Ethnic community cookbooks, like A Treasure for my Daughter, show the tensions that existed between wanting to assimilate and wanting to maintain cultural distinctiveness. The only place the show *kind of* addressed cultural diversity was with the visit to the Chinese restaurant with Lily Cho . Cho brought up that there was some acceptance of the food but not of the Chinese people themselves. (See conversation below.) Cho’s work (Eating Chinese) suggests that Chinese immigrants used their restaurants to define “Canadian food for Canadians” through their understanding of dominant Canadian foodways being anything that wasn’t Chinese (52-55). By ignoring cultural diversity the show is taking food’s importance to identity for granted.

I’d be remiss not to at least mention the food that was made on the show; it was fine in but not as good as the 1940s. As I predicted, technology and novelty featured heavily in this episode, with particular attention given to kitchen appliances and convenience foods. Considering how much crazier things got in the 50s with new convenience food products on the market and the increased access to more exoctic fruits, this episode’s food was really boring.  (Although kudos to Tristan turning out a successful moulded salad.) This was the decade of pineapple upside down and chiffon cakes and really showcasing your culinary talent. Dainty items like deviled eggs and fancy canapes made out of a variety of culinary oddities available in a can were ideal to accompany an in-home cocktail party for friends. Sure, they had some fancy oysters at their final 1950s dinner, but books like The Joy of Cooking and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book also featured main course items like Chicken a la king and Tuna-potato chip casserole. However, instead of featuring these experimental dishes, they show Tristan spending 4 hours (!!!) making pot roast, or steak, and potatoes. This is then turned into commentary on women’s time being taken up with “endless cooking.” The amount of time Tristan spends in the kitchen on preparing food speaks more to her inexperience as a cook than it does to the tediousness of cooking in any decade.

The other thing that really got me with this episode was the emphasis on female appearance. This was handled well in some places, like with Tristan and Aaron’s breakfast. We see Aaron being served a beautifully large breakfast of bacon, fried eggs, and hashbrowns, while Tristan serves herself up some cottage cheese, a poached egg, and some cantaloupe. This lead to a rather insightful discussion between the couple on food and gender, with Aaron noting a long cultural obsession with weight and how “grossly unjust” the meal difference was. However, when it came to female fashion, I think the show overemphasised (as Andrea also noted above) the idea of perfection. I couldn’t help but think of Lucy from “I Love Lucy” as a realistic example of the 1950s housewife. She wears nice clothes out, and usually when Ricky is home or Ethel and Fred are over, but she is just as likely to be sporting a flannel shirt and a pair of pants or a house dress with a scarf over her hair while completing household tasks. And she’s usually wearing flat shoes at home. Forcing Tristan to clean while wearing heels and a crinoline seems particularly ridiculous when you think about Lucy’s house clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I love the costumes, but why not let Tristan change into a house dress and flats for the chores and then have them change for company and dinner?

Overall, this episode painted a stereotypical and homogenous experience of the 1950s that ignored the complexity (and, occasionally, reality) of the decade. I’ll leave with a quote from my grandma: “The 1950s were great if you were rich; they were also terrible if you lived in poverty.”

 

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Discussion

K: Okay so I kind of like Tristan. She is really kind of getting the ideas of the romanticized 50s and pressure on women. And she’s such a trooper.

Also I yelled at the tv for suggesting that home economics became a profession starting in the 50s. Nonsense.

A: She totally gets it.

Yeah, and women’s ‘new’ purchasing power in the fifties. Arrrggggg.

K: Oh yes that was my other thing. As if women weren’t always buying things for the home. Or didn’t have to check with their husbands first.

A: Terry O’Reilly did a fantastic two-part podcast on the subject, and discussed how it can be traced back to the (American) Civil War and new reliance on canned goods. It was a really nuanced take on the relationship between consumption, advertising, and gender norms. (The podcast: CBC’s Under the Influence, episode on Happy Homemakers.)

K: I was also finding this “women have no free time” thing frustrating. Diane Tye’s book addresses how women used their work in community to have social life and how the convenience foods helped to free up their time

And my other thing was that they didn’t really talk much about teenagers really becoming a “thing” in the 50s.

A: Btw, can we take a moment to appreciate that Tristan got tired beating eggs after 30 seconds??

K: YES!

A: Hehehehe.

K: I have the same egg beater.

A: I use a stand mixer. :p

K: I had my mom’s/my aunt’s old stand mixer from the 70s. It was so stylish. Until it started on fire.

A: :O

K: Not a big fire. Mostly just smoke.

K: And why is the dad literally doing nothing around the house? They are just playing games.

A: No home repair, mowing.

K: Or working on a project with his son like building something. (Not that the fallout shelter thing wasn’t a bit of an activity.)

A: Except the brief and random “organizing food for the fallout shelter.”

K: Very random. I feel like that would make more sense in the 60s.

Also the best thing was that fish stick explanation. I had no idea about that.

A: Yes! Me too! That was legitimately cool. My mom made them when I was little. I hated them.

K: I have never had a fish stick.

A: Consider yourself lucky.

K: I still think they are really playing into the tropes with the show though.

A: Totally. Although the part about Chinese food was awesome.

K: YES LILY CHO!!!!

A: I like Lily Cho’s work, but they never explained the whole small-town vs. big cities thing.

K: Nope. Still nothing about that.

A: Also, totally made me hungry for Chinese food.

K: Because it totally matters.

Me too! I haven’t had any in a long time. I should get some next week.

K: Oh and breakfast. It’s kind of cute how they have the parents do a breakfast together without the kids. (And a bit confusing.)

Cottage cheese and fruit is basically my go to breakfast.

A: I do not understand cottage cheese.

K: That’s okay. It comes up a lot in my research haha.

A: But glad to see Aaron mention the long obsession with weight.

K: Yes. That was good. He seems pretty “woke” and I can tell that he might like to be in the kitchen.

A: Though the preferred silhouette in the fifties was with hourglass, with big boobs. But I loved the clothes! They didn’t talk about hairdressers though.

K: Good point. They seem very focused on this “food history” thing and seem to leave out a lot of context because of it.

A: Yep. Which makes no sense. Steak and potatoes is not that interesting.

K: Oh. I still want to know what Aaron’s job is supposed to be. Like, how much money would he be making? He must have a really good job if they can get a TV and all those fancy appliances. And we are not talking about lunch at all yet. What do they have for lunch?

A:  No clue. Or what happens outside the home.

K: Nope not at all. And there is a lot to be said about design and marketing There was a lot of design crossover with cars. And I think a lot of producers marketing to women “this is what you need.”

A: Yup. Washing machines.Those ads kill me.

Maybe they’ll do car culture next week?

K: But, cars are outside the house. So it would have to be related to a drive through somehow.

They should have gone to a drive-in!

A: Timmies trip!!

My mom taught me to set a table like that though. And she learned from her mom. She grew up in a very traditional Jewish family, and middle-class performance was very important.

K: Ah. My mom did not really teach me that, she had to learn it when she took on food studies after I moved away and now she tells me when I mess up. I think my mom’s family was like that before she was born. She grew up in the 1960/70s when her parents were already in their 40s.

A: Well, I am a little older than you are. My mom was born in 1955. So she got the full brunt.

K: I bet she did!

A: Which reminds me, going back to the issue of Chinese food…was a little worried that they implied Chinese immigrants only came after 1945. It was kinda edging on othering.

K: Oh ya. I got that too. I think also that Chinese restaurants were also around a lot earlier than they implied. Because I think a major part of Cho’s argument is about how those restaurants were important in small towns. I  think the show just did a really sloppy put together of two ideas – Chinese food and the rise of families going out to eat – in a way that didn’t serve either idea very well

A: Agreed. But Lily Cho was awesome.

K: She was. I actually cheered when I saw her. 🙂

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Sources: 

• Gerard Bouchard, “Through the Meshes of Patriarchy: The Male/Female Relationship in the Saguenay Peasant Society, 1860-1930.” History of the Family 4, 4 (1999): 397-425.
• Valerie Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
• Suzanne Morton,  Ideal Surroundings: Domestic Life in a Working-Class Suburb in the 1920s. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
• Joy Parr,  Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
• Ted Regehr, Mennonites in Canada, 1939-1970: A People Transformed. Vol. 3 of Mennonites in Canada, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

 

Recommended Readings: 1950s

• Tarah Brookfield, Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity, 1945-1975 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012).
• Isabel Campbell, “Exemplary Canadians? How Two Canadian Women Remember Their Roles in a Cold War Military Family,” Journal Of The Canadian Historical Association 27, no. 1 (January 2016): 61-93
• Lily Cho, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
• Andrea Eidinger, “Gefilte Fish and Roast Duck with Orange Slices: A Treasure for my Daughter and the Creation of a Jewish Cultural Orthodoxy in Postwar Montreal,” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, edited by Marlene App, Valerie J. Korinek, and Franca Iacovetta, 189-208 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
• Marlene Epp, Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
• Franca Iacovetta, Such Hard-working People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). 
• Franca Iacovetta and Valerie J. Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria: The Gender Politics of Food,” in Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History, 2nd ed., ed. Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
• Stéphanie O’Neill, “Le soleil de la prospérité actuelle ne luit pas pour tout le monde ‘: les exclus de la société de consommation à Montréal, 1945-1975,” Revue d’histoire de L’Amerique francaise 70, no. 4 (Printemps 2017): 55-70.
• Noula Mina, “Taming and Training Greek ‘Peasant Girls’ and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s-1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (December 2013): 514-539.
• Robert Rutherdale, “Fatherhood, masculinity, and the good life during Canada’s baby boom, 1945-1965,” Journal Of Family History 24, no. 3 (July 1999): 351-374.
• Robert Rutherdale and Magda Fahrni, eds. Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, Dissent, 1945-75 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
• Joan Sangster, “The Meanings of Mercy: Wife Assault and Spousal Murder in Post-Second World War Canada.” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 4 (December 2016): 513-545.
• Diane Tye, Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

 

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Crossing our fingers for the 1960s. The previews showed BBQing, so we shall see. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this week’s review of Back in Time for Dinner! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup. See you then!