I just walked out of my Food History seminar tonight with a new appreciation for the fact that not so long ago we women were still hunched over the floor and cooking over an open fire.
Did you know that America was the last industrialized nation to accept the new invention that became the stove?
Religious men far and wide in America railed at the pulpit against allowing the family to retrofit their hearth to have a coal (or wood based) stove thus elevating women from the back breaking drudgery of cooking at the open hearth and allowing them to work upright something we had all done from primal animals thousands of years before. These deacons, priests, ministers and men of the cloth considered the stove to be evil, or the devils work. They rallied and cried that if women had a range in the house or a stove they would suddenly have free time thus leading them straight to the path of hell.
Free time!
A sin!
Imagine all the free time these women would have after raising the children, running the family household, doing the laundry by hand with lye soap, preserving the harvest, sewing the family clothes by hand, obtaining enough water to cook and clean and cooking all of the family's food.
These women might save..oh say...an hour or two from being a slave to stoking the fires.
With this new invention they might no longer have to reach into an open hearth and swing the crane arm around to bring the pot of stew closer to them while adding more wood and tending the flames underneath. They might not have to burn wood for over two hours in the beehive oven in order to reach temperatures hot enough to bake the families bread. Their petticoats might not ignite into human torches by the sparks of the open fire.
The next time fair readers think of these women and how this freedom came not so long ago as you stand over your cooktop and stir your pot of soup.
We've come a long way baby indeed.