The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

Home Cooking:
Betty Crocker and Womanhood in
Early Twentieth-Century America

Ai HISANO*INTRODUCTION
In 1932 the milling company General Mills, Inc. printed a recipe booklet entitled 15 Ways to a Man’s Heart “by Betty Crocker.” This twentyfour-page booklet introduced “ﬁfteen simpliﬁed recipes” as a way toimpress one’s husband and to reach his heart by cooking what he likes
to eat.1 Since the early twentieth century, cookbooks and food advertisements have frequently exhorted women to associate food with love withphrases such as the “way to man’s heart is through his stomach.”2 In her
book about food advertisements, Katherine J. Parkin contends thatadvertisers “consistently used the ‘food is love’ dictum to sanctify theconnection between women and food.”3 In particular, women’s magazines, cookbooks, and advertisements articulated that food cooked athome was one of the most important ways to demonstrate one’s love.
Many food companies presented their products as “homemade” foods totheir female customers, even while these were becoming increasingly
precooked and packaged from the late nineteenth century onward. By
analyzing the romanticizing of homemade foods in the early twentiethcentury United States, we can see how home cooking came to be

Copyright © 2010 Ai Hisano. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Graduate Student, University of Delaware

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connected with a feminine way to express women’s affection for theirfamilies. I argue that home cooking took on gendered ideology throughthe historical process. Understanding social and historical contexts
reveals how gender norms and ideal womanhood have been portrayed,reiterated, and assumed.4
As Parkin found, the food industry and advertisements played a crucial role in forging intimate relations between homemade foods andlove.5 To investigate how home cooking acquired a connotation of love,
I focus here on “Betty Crocker,” created by General Mills as a marketingﬁgure in 1921. Over the years, this ﬁctitious woman gradually assumed
the image of a real person, as she appeared as an author of many cookbooks and as a speaker on a popular radio program. Betty Crocker provided housewives with a wide range of advice about cooking meals andactively promoted certain images of ideal womanhood. Rather thansimply being an advertisement or brand logo, Betty Crocker was carefully designed to personalize the company and perform the role of a realadviser, thereby serving as a mediator between the company and its customers. Through cooking advice, General Mills/Betty Crocker emphasized the importance of home cooking, especially the emotional functionof food and women’s responsibility at home, and in so doing it endorsed
woman’s role as housewife.
Scholars of consumerism and the food history have studied Betty
Crocker mostly as an advertising character or a corporate cooking adviser. Laura Shapiro explores the effect of industrialization on homecooking as well as the relation between cooking, home, and gender byfocusing on Betty Crocker, Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, and Betty
Friedan.6 But her detailed and wide-ranging analysis of these wellknown female ﬁgures does not fully consider the historical and social
circumstances of the larger society that produced them. Karal A. Marling
also argues that Betty Crocker not only promoted General Mills products
but also offered housewives a useful narrative for understanding food.7
Although the author insists on the ideology behind the making of sucha ﬁctitious woman as Betty Crocker, she does not analyze in detail how
and why food and cooking gained a connotation of female love for thefamily. In her 2005 book about Betty Crocker, Finding Betty Crocker:
The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food, Susan Marks examines
the history of Betty Crocker, as well as consumer responses, by utilizing a wide range of primary sources including letters from housewives
to Betty Crocker and internal documents from General Mills.8 Her book

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is signiﬁcant for understanding interrelations between the ﬁctitious
woman and consumers. Beyond this book’s illuminating the history of
Betty Crocker, however, the message this female character presented to
women and its related discourse on home and cooking has not yet been
investigated. The social circumstances under which Betty Crocker was
created and the grounds for her popularity show the politics of dignifying home cooking, which went beyond mere routine housework.
In the early twentieth century dynamic transformations in the American
food business and the rise of a new culture of consumption profoundly
affected social values related to cooking, family, and gender. Technological development and the introduction of processed foods drasticallychanged the ways in which women cooked at home. Furthermore, many
chain stores and self-service supermarkets, serving as venues for themass consumption of mass-produced goods, introduced new consumption practices.9 As more housewives were facing problems of new household tasks, Betty Crocker provided precise advice on everything fromcooking and buying foods to personal concerns about family by urging
them to use General Mills products. The words of Betty Crocker were
not merely advertising statements for the company but dulcet, friendly
messages that assured women that the correct product would enable them
to “keep pace with their changing society.”10
While Betty Crocker continued to serve as a cooking adviser and hermessage always referred to women’s love for the family throughout thetwentieth century, her primary role has changed over the years. In her
early years, this ﬁctitious woman introduced housewives to new concepts and modern ways of cooking, such as “scientiﬁc cooking” and newhousehold technology. During the 1940s, utilizing patriotic narratives,
Betty Crocker mostly exhorted American women to devote themselvesto the war effort. The 1950s through the 1970s were the decades when
her messages began aiming at not only housewives but also “today’s
busy women” who worked outside the home.11 Since, in this essay, I aim
to analyze the social construction of the “food is love dictum” in the earlytwentieth century, rather than to examine the historical transformationof the ﬁctitious woman, I pay particular attention to Betty Crocker’s
cooking advice in the 1920s and 1930s, and investigate how she materialized the sanctiﬁcation of home cooking.
In the following sections, ﬁrst, I examine Betty Crocker’s main customers and messages and assert that home cooking advice was premisedon the ideal of middle-class housewives. Second, I investigate how Betty

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Crocker and other cooking advisers encouraged women to cook at home.
In an era that espoused science, scientiﬁc cooking was a way to achieve
ideal motherhood without failure. Third, I focus on why home cooking
became a supreme task for women, who were regarded as having a great
inﬂuence on the family. In the last section I discuss the transformationof housewifery, which strengthened a perceived tie between home cooking and affection. Focusing on Betty Crocker in relation to conceptionsof science and technology, gender roles, and family norms elucidates
how and why ideal womanhood was deﬁned and connected to housewifery, especially to home cooking. To understand the construction ofhome cooking ideology in society at large, it is imperative to investigate
the history of food and cooking.
I.

IDEAL HOUSEWIVESIn November 1921 General Mills printed a puzzle on the back of theSaturday Evening Post as one of its advertising campaigns. In addition
to nearly thirty thousand responses with completed puzzles, the company received hundreds of letters from its customers, mainly housewives, asking how to make such things as one-crust cherry pies or apple
dumplings. General Mills believed that these women would feel a personal link to the company if they received a reply letter from a female
person. The advertising department, headed by Samuel Gale, decided tosign the name Betty Crocker on every letter sent to their customers
regarding recipes, cooking, baking, or other domestic advice.12 Female
employees at General Mills, mostly home economists with college degrees, began to write these letters to customers, cookbooks, and radio
scripts under the name of Betty Crocker. The “mortalization” of Betty
Crocker, as James Gray points out, was “the work of many minds.”13
During the 1920s and 1930s, in responding to “a vacuum of personal
advice” in an industrialized modern society, American advertisers explored new ways to personalize their relationship with the consumer.
They increasingly replaced “objective information on products” with
“subjective information about the hopes and anxieties of the consumer”
in a sympathetic and friendly manner. Accordingly, many food corporations created humanlike characters to offer housewives advice on
cooking, while simultaneously promoting their products in a more intimate tone.14

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For the ﬁrst three years, Betty Crocker was nothing but a mere signature on letters, recipes, and advertisements. The nationwide popularity
came after this ﬁctitious woman went on the air. In October 1924 General
Mills started a ﬁfteen-minute radio program, Gold Medal Home Service
Talk. A female employee of the company, Blanche Ingersoll, appeared
as Betty Crocker and began offering a program that featured cooking
lessons. Ingersoll’s Betty Crocker introduced a variety of recipes thatalways designated the use of General Mills products.15 The “students”
of the cooking program were supposed to cook the dish they had learnedon the radio individually at home and were encouraged to send a reportabout the result of their cooking to the company. Moreover, the company asked them to send a receipt or signature of a store clerk with theircooking report to prove that they had bought the company’s products.16
Such an educational program met many women’s needs for cooking
and other domestic advice: in 1925, 47,000 new listeners registered forthe program, and the number of registrants soared to 250,000 by 1933,
reﬂecting the considerable popularity of the Betty Crocker programamong women.17 Since General Mills was a milling company that mainly
sold ﬂour, it was crucial for the company not only to publicize the brandname but also to promote cooking in general so as to persuade women
to buy their products. Over the radio, by offering listeners concrete advice on how to provide nutritious meals to the family, Betty Crocker
encouraged women to cook at home with General Mills products.
Thanks to the popularity of the radio program, Betty Crocker becamea famous icon in twentieth-century American society. Her messages,
however, did not necessarily reach all American women; especially during the early years, the range of her customers was relatively restricted
and her home cooking advice was also quite limited. At the turn of thetwentieth century, the ideology of domesticity promoted in the UnitedStates was based on limited grounds. It mostly reﬂected the concerns ofwhite, Anglo, middle-class women in the Northeast, and its exponents
usually held a biased view of women of other classes, regions, ethnic origins, and colors.18 The ﬁrst portrait of Betty Crocker, drawn in 1936,
reﬂected such attitudes. General Mills commissioned a well-known
commercial illustrator, Neysa McMein, to make Betty Crocker’s portrait. According to James Gray, McMein’s Betty Crocker was “theperfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman” with “aﬁne Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution,

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and features that might be claimed contentedly by various Europeangroups.”19 This ﬁctitious woman reﬂected the norm of ideal womanhoodin the early twentieth century based primarily on the features of a typical white woman. In Mary D. McFeely’s words, this kind of whitenesswas “an unmarked characteristic” of the 1920s.20
In addition, the listenership of Betty Crocker’s radio program and hercooking advice showed that her message of home cooking was based on
the white middle-class norm. Since the program was aired from 10:45 to
11:00 every morning, its listeners were mainly those who stayed at homeduring the day, namely, women who did not need to work outside the home.
Even if working-class women were able to listen to a radio and tune in to
the Betty Crocker program at their workplaces, it was simply difﬁcult forthem to write down the recipes during their work time, let alone send cooking reports to the company afterward.21 Such women had few, if any,
opportunities to participate in the Betty Crocker radio cooking school.22
Betty Crocker’s advice also evinced to a great degree the ideal andgender norms of middle-class white women of the period. For example,
Betty Crocker frequently praised modern cooking facilities: “The older
members of the group will remember the back-breaking effort of keeping the kitchen range ﬁlled with wood or coal. [. . .] In most homes today
we employ magic—we turn the faucet in the white sink for water, lightthe gas or turn on the electricity.”23 After the First World War, gas andelectric stoves became more popular than old models fueled by coal,wood, gasoline, or kerosene. General Electric and Westinghouse developed the prototype of electric stoves in the early twentieth century, whichbecame increasingly popular despite many defects.24
However, the ownership of gas and electric ovens depended on a family’s ﬁnancial ability and residential location. At the time, gas lines andelectric power were being made available to an increasing number ofhomes in urban areas. By the 1930s, 85 percent of nonfarm dwellings
had electric service. Although gas and electricity became increasingly
available in urban working-class homes by the 1920s, only about 10 percent of rural homes had the service in 1930.25 Such imbalance of service
between rural and urban areas inﬂuenced the ownership of electric
stoves. In large cities households were more likely to have gas and electric stoves; 95 percent of homes in Cleveland, for instance, cooked withgas or electricity in 1935.26 Among tenant farmers in Tennessee, in contrast, only eight out of two hundred households could afford electric service in the mid-1930s, and not a single one had running water, although

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the area was considered “progressive” in rural electriﬁcation.27 The idealof modern cooking that Betty Crocker admired as “magic” was largely
based on the expectations of urban middle-class households, which had
better access to utilities and commercial goods. Working-class mothers
and wives were not only deprived of opportunities to receive lessons anddomestic advice through cooking schools, women’s magazines, andradio programs, but they also lacked access to the technology that would
enable the realization of “ideal” lives.
II.

MODERN COOKING

At the turn of the twentieth century, cooking advisers exhorted women
to use up-to-date domestic technologies and to incorporate new values
and behaviors into their household tasks.28 Home economists and othercooking experts believed that science would make domestic work professional, and they introduced scientiﬁc methods as a modern way of
cooking. It was not the ﬁrst time that professionalism was introduced
into housewifery. In the mid-nineteenth century, Catharine Beecher
advocated the need for efﬁcient housework, as well as for the educationof women, in her popular books, including A Treatise on Domestic
Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (1841)
and The American Women’s Home, or, Principles of Domestic Science(1869). Under the inﬂuence of Beecher’s philosophy, social reformers
and home economists such as Ellen Richards promoted the home economics movement beginning in the late 1890s. The movement aimed toestablish domestic work as worthy and professional by applying business techniques, such as efﬁciency and rationality, to household tasks.29
As professionals of domesticity, college-educated home economists
began teaching biology, chemistry, bacteriology, and child psychology
at women’s colleges and land-grant universities. Economics was also
included in their curricula to teach female students management of thehousehold budget and economical consumption. Some home economists
also hosted cooking lessons for housewives on a local community
basis.30 Their strong belief in science and professionalism as well as faith
in the capacities of experts reﬂected the characteristics of the Progressive
movement at the turn of the twentieth century. The home economics
movement showed that women’s zeal for social reform in the Progressive
Era was not limited to the arena of politics and the education system but
also included the private sphere of the home.

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Some home economists were employed in schools and government
institutions such as the Bureau of Home Economics, and others began
to work for food companies and home appliance businesses by the 1920s.
The primary mission of home economists in the industry was to develop
products and recipes that explained how customers should use a company’s certain branded goods. Moreover, companies like General Mills
not only hired female personnel but also created ﬁctitious home economists such as Aunt Jenny (Lever Brothers) to provide their customers
with advice on cooking and to promote their products. Such links between home economists and the food industry symbolized the new link
between home and business.31
As the representative of home economists who worked for General
Mills, Betty Crocker gave housewives speciﬁc advice on their concerns
about cooking and shopping by promoting the company’s products such
as Gold Medal ﬂour. As already noted, her advice was initially createdby home economists who wrote the letters and cookbooks. Thus thehome economics movement had a signiﬁcant impact on the invention
and ensuing popularity of Betty Crocker. Her advice often referred to theprinciples of the movement, especially the importance of science, inorder to convince housewives to buy General Mills products and to become ideal mothers and wives who could cook nutritious meals for theirfamilies. Efﬁciency in housework became increasingly important when
the supply of domestic servants diminished and middle-class women
began to undertake housekeeping tasks.32 Betty Crocker also emphasized
rationality and accuracy, and it was essential to “use a recipe and measure everything carefully” to make “perfect” dishes.33 In order to measure precise temperature for baking, oven thermometers were given to
customers as a prize in one Betty Crocker campaign.34
As more and more household appliances were invented and packaged
foods became popular in the early twentieth century, Betty Crocker
embraced the modernity of such new products.35 It was essential for“modern homemakers” to eradicate guesswork and uncertainty fromtheir cooking. The solution was, Betty Crocker suggested, the company’s“unvaryingly uniform” product, Gold Medal ﬂour, which worked out “toa degree of scientiﬁc exactness” that made results unvarying. She pronounced that the company’s scientiﬁc product testing “eliminate[d]chance” of failure and “the old-fashioned guess-work has now been
removed from baking,” so that women did not have to attribute theircooking results to luck.36 Customers were warned that without GoldHOME COOKING

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Medal ﬂour, they would end up with dry, hard cookies, “as if they weremade of dust and ashes.” In order to appease customers’ fear of failure
and to urge them to use the company’s products, which made cookies“wonderfully rich tasting, tender and keep their moisture,” Betty Crocker
presented General Mills products as foolproof ingredients and modern
cooking as the way to accomplish women’s “supreme” task of domesticity.37
To modernize cooking practices, Betty Crocker also directed housewives to closely follow her recipes. Regardless of the product quality, if
women cooked in their own way, imprecise measurement and guesswork
would cause a disastrous result. It was crucial for the company to ensurethat the ﬂour “always act[ed] the same” in every oven at every home andthat any women could cook without failure in order to market their products.38 Betty Crocker’s recipes were carefully tested by home economists
at the company’s product-development laboratory, called the “Betty
Crocker Kitchen,” before being introduced to customers.39 Betty Crocker
afﬁrmed that her recipes were reliable since they were tested with “thelatest scientiﬁc methods” by professional home economists “who have
had considerable experience.”40 Every recipe included a list of ingredients (one of them was always Gold Medal ﬂour), the quantity needed,
the order of cooking, and the cooking time. These directions, given inminute detail, enabled housewives, both inexperienced and experienced,
to cook meals at home. At the same time, home cooking became a replication of foods that had been tested in a corporate kitchen. In the 1920s
not only processed foods but also recipes presented to private households
were “precooked” and “packaged” before reaching consumers.
Betty Crocker’s advice on home baking suggested that modern andscientiﬁc cooking was not incompatible with old-fashioned taste. She
extolled the cooking of the good old days, especially the taste of“Grandma’s cooking.” In her radio program, Betty Crocker introduced
raisin-ﬁlled cookies as “the true, old-fashioned kind, the kind grandmother used to keep in her cooky [sic] jar.”41 The recipe for fresh cherry
cobbler was “another one of the modernized speed recipes for disheswith old-fashioned charm.”42 Old-style cooking techniques, such as
using guesswork, had to be eliminated, but not the taste. The term “oldfashioned” signiﬁed homey and memorable foods. Such sentimental
quality of cooking and tastes was increasingly stressed by women’s magazines and cookbooks in the early twentieth century.

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AI HISANOIII.

INFLUENCE FOR HAPPINESS

Popular magazines and cookbooks repeatedly emphasized the sacreddignity and importance of domesticity, and presented home cooking as
an honorable duty, particularly for middle-class housewives. They
claimed that cooking was not a simple chore that anyone could do, but
a critical task that demanded knowledge, skills, and womanly devotion.
In her very ﬁrst radio program, broadcast in October 1924, Betty Crocker
emphasized this signiﬁcance of cooking: “If then, cooking, the preparation of food, so affects not only our own dispositions and our work, butalso the happiness and efﬁciency of those with whom we come in contact, surely it is a most important subject and worthy of our serious consideration.”43 Betty Crocker insisted that housewives should contributeto a healthy and happy home life because cooking was a valuable task.
This heightened importance of housework partly derived from thedecline in the number of domestic servants. Since the late nineteenth century, the servant problem had become a serious concern for many middle-class households. By the early 1920s, domestic servants became stillless available to private families. The number of those employed indomestic occupations declined by 49 percent between 1870 and 1920.
Only a few American homes employed full-time servants, and evenfewer had live-in servants.44
After the enactment of immigration laws in the 1920s, including theEmergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924, theinﬂux of foreign-born young women diminished. Since a large proportion of those immigrant women had worked as domestic servants in
American homes, the immigration restrictions impacted the alreadydeclining number of servants.45 Several historians also attribute the decrease of domestics to the socioeconomic situation in early twentiethcentury America. The expanding economy of the 1920s increased theopportunities in factories for women with limited skills, and better work
opportunities and higher wages in these other sectors meant that only relatively wealthy families could afford to hire domestic help.46
The servant problem was accompanied by other problems related todomesticity and middle-class housewives. First, without domestic help,
middle-class housewives needed to carry out all the work at home bythemselves. But even as they had to cope with a variety of new types ofhousework, many women living in cities were far from their mothers andother relatives who could teach them such tasks. In an urbanized andindustrialized society, the number of nuclear families had increased by

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1920, when urban residents outnumbered people living on farms and inrural areas.47 Besides, the new tasks of cooking with processed foods andbuying packaged products were unfamiliar to these women’s mothers
and grandmothers.48
Urbanization, the increase in the number of nuclear families, and new
consumption practices forced many housewives to seek help other thanfrom their mothers. Already in the late nineteenth century, cooking
schools for middle-class women began appearing in big cities.49 As
women’s literacy rate increased, these urban, educated women createda market for many advice books, novels, and cookbooks.50 Consequently,
through offering cooking skills and knowledge to middle-class housewives, cooking schools as well as the printing industry promoted theimportance of home cooking as a women’s domestic duty.
The increased domestic responsibility of middle-class housewives andthe decrease in numbers of servants posed another problem due to thedifference in social and economic status between these two groups. The
majority of domestics were uneducated and unskilled immigrants or nonwhite women who earned low wages and had a lower social position. In
order to distinguish between servants and middle-class housewives,
women’s magazines and cookbooks assigned a new meaning to the domestic work that had been conducted by the former group. According toMaxine L. Margolis, “the women’s magazines of the 1920s waxed longand eloquent on the differences in emotional quality between the loving
wife and mother and the ‘uneducated’ (black or immigrant) maid.” Their
message was that “no maid could ever perform housework with the same
degree of emotional attachment as the woman of the house could.”51
In order to persuade women that housework was not an onerous
burden, Betty Crocker reiterated the dignity of housewifery and theenjoyment of cooking. She declared that one of her aims was to “makewomen’s familiar job of housekeeping less a monotonous routine” andto “brighten the daily routine of the busy housewife through [her] recipes
and suggestions.” “The art of cooking,” emphasized Betty Crocker, was“one of the most enjoyable and satisfying pastimes.”52 For this ﬁctitious
woman, cooking was not a mere routine but a creative, enjoyable art.
The pleasure of cooking, however, was not solely for women’s amusement. Housewives were expected to take care of the physical as well as
mental health of their families through everyday cooking. It was important for women to realize that “a good cook has a real inﬂuence forhappiness as great as a woman could have in any occupation.”53 Betty
Crocker averred:

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AI HISANO[I]t is not enough that we be merely fed, but we must be well fed to be happy.
The big problem the mother of a family faces is not merely to keep her family alive but to keep them in radiant health and brimming with life and happiness. In order to do this she must know the value of different foods in the
body and how to prepare these foods. In other words, she must be a goodcook.54

Responding to Betty Crocker’s advice, her customers agreed that a goodwife/mother meant being a good cook and that “all girls should know
how to cook, before they get married.” Some even thought that if women
did not try to be “good wives,” they were likely to lose their husbands.55
As middle-class housewives became responsible for more domestic
work in the 1920s, women’s magazines, cookbooks, newspaper columns, and radio programs found new business opportunities, and offeredthem domestic advice and cooking lessons. At the same time, the foodbusiness and advertisement industry presented housework as indispensable to the family physically and emotionally. The sanctiﬁcation ofhousewifery was closely associated with the transformation of demographic and industrial structures as well as with the increasing level ofcommercialization in American society.
IV.

MOTHER AS A HOSTESSIn the 1920s popular magazines began referring to the American
woman as “housewife” rather than as “housekeeper.” This reﬂectedchanging attitudes about women’s role in the home, particularly thewife’s role as a “mate.”56 Such new notions of relations between husband and wife produced a new concept of marriage— “companionate
marriage.” Its ideal of companionship was mutual and equal relationships between a man and a woman united not by economic needs orreligious faith but by both partners’ sexual, emotional, and personalneeds.57 The middle-class housewife came to be regarded as a marriage
partner, while domestic work still remained central to the married
woman’s role; thus, the housewife’s job during the 1920s was transformed into what Matthews has called a “post-industrial one.” Thespread of the automobile, the declining number of servants, and the new
types of commercial products, such as processed foods, “put middleclass housewives squarely into service mode, whether chauffeuringchildren, running errands, or shopping in a self-service market.”58 The

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service that women provided the family was making sure that the homeremained a happy and pleasurable place for its members.
Despite the help of newly introduced processed foods and domestic
appliances, which were advertised as “labor-saving,” the total amountof time housewives spent on domestic work changed little. In addition,these new household appliances raised the standard of good housework,and thus domestic tasks became more demanding—for instance, theintroduction of the washing machine meant that housewives were expected to attain a higher standard of cleanliness. While middle-classwomen were able to ﬁnish some chores in shorter time, they allocatedmore time to other work such as child rearing and cleaning.59 Child carein particular was regarded as an essential task for housewives. Baby clinics as well as women’s magazines insisted that primary responsibility
for children’s physical and mental health lay with their mothers. As
domestic advisers underscored the importance of child rearing, especially the responsibilities of mothers to care for and discipline children,
housewives were expected to fulﬁll the emotional needs of their families.60
As the maternal role of women attained greater importance inAmerican society, making “perfect” dishes and choosing a “better” product were not the only areas women needed to excel in. Many women’smagazines increasingly suggested that housework was an expression of
the housewife’s personality, and she was supposed to provide love anda feeling of security to her family through the meals she cooked. “Everyhome with children should have a full cookie jar,” insisted Betty Crocker,
and “every home-loving man, the kind who wants to dedicate his life tobringing up a family . . . should have good appetizing meals, and there
should be a full cookie jar in his home,” and encouraged women to bakecookies for their family using Gold Medal ﬂour.61 Cookies were presented as a symbol of love, and they needed to be home baked. Betty
Crocker asserted that baking and cooking was closely associated withlove for the family, and exhorted women that only General Mills products enabled them to achieve their goal of cooking nutritious meals forthe family in an easy and desirable way. By closely uniting scientiﬁccooking with the concept of the family, Betty Crocker not only provided
women with knowledge about “science” and cooking, but also offeredthem a way to become ideal mothers and wives.
Many of Betty Crocker’s customers shared such gender norms. One
woman wrote to Betty Crocker, “Isn’t there something I could do to make

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my husband more comfortable around his own ﬁreside?”62 Another
woman said that “I think if women were as eager to learn new ways ofﬁxing new dishes or remodeling the old ones, as they are in new beauty
aids and how to make themselves more lovely [sic], they wouldn’t haveso much trouble in keeping their husbands in good humor. Not that theyshouldn’t keep themselves lovely.”63 Replying to such letters from hercustomers, Betty Crocker offered to send one woman “a few special
recipes which [are] known to have worked many charms” to “help keep
happiness supreme in the household.”64 Since family members were busy
with separate activities during the day, dinnertime was the only opportunity for them to get together at home.65 Another housewife was concerned about whether her homemade dishes could satisfy her husband’spalate and asked Betty Crocker for a “good Bread recipe,” hoping to “trythe nearest way to his heart.” Betty Crocker conﬁdently recommended
her recipes: “I am delighted to come to the rescue in the domestic problem now confronting you . . . and ﬁrmly believe that our Gold Medal
Recipes are going to accomplish the same miracle in your home that they
have in thousands of other homes throughout the country.”66 Betty
Crocker’s recipes and General Mills products served as the apparatus bywhich customers constructed part of their identity and reassured theirroles as “good” mothers and wives; and homemade foods symbolized
women’s love for the family.
These housewives were expected to offer their hospitality to their own
families as well as their neighbors and friends by hosting luncheons, tea
parties, and birthday parties.67 A woman living in Amsterdam, New
York, sent Betty Crocker a letter asking for economical recipes andmenus for a luncheon that she was asked to host.68 In order to answer
this sort of question, Betty Crocker offered, every Thursday, “regularlittle radio party planning” that introduced refreshments, table decorations, and “stunts for all sorts of festive occasions.”69 Betty Crocker’smenu for luncheons included checkerboard sandwiches, medallion sandwiches, cheese and corn soufﬂé with creamed mushrooms, and biscuits
cut in heart shapes.70 She also suggested that fancy shapes of cookies
would look more “partiﬁed,”71 and she even introduced ideas for decoration of rooms, games to play at a party, and souvenirs for guests.72
Hosting home parties became one of the important roles of middle-classhousewives, and it was also an opportunity for them to display their cooking skills and hospitality.

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Urbanization and industrialization, combined with the decline of thefamily’s role in production, transformed the traditional family ideal of
patriarchal authority and hierarchical organization into a new ideal basedon mutual relations between husband and wife. Nonetheless, womenremained responsible for most of the housework, or even gained more
responsibilities at home such as providing emotional fulﬁllment to thefamily. Middle-class housewives, in particular, were expected to provide
their families with nutritious meals and emotional satisfaction.
CONCLUSION
The 1920s was a paradoxical decade for American women in many
ways.73 While women acquired voting rights, they did not form any powerful voting block nor did they gain as many signiﬁcant political ofﬁces
as feminists had expected. This was the era of the New Woman, who
was said to seek new social roles, femaleness, and sexual self-expression. But the basic sex roles remained unchanged, and women still had
limited career choices and were expected to fulﬁll their roles as mothers
and wives. Although working mothers and wives were considered tohave a negative effect on the national economy and on the family, many
working-class women had no other choice but to work for a living. Home
cooking during this period was equally paradoxical. Home cooking
advice was mainly aimed at middle-class housewives and reﬂected middle-class ideals. Many working-class women had few opportunities tolearn cooking skills through women’s magazines and cookbooks. They
also had only limited access to modern cooking appliances and utilities.
Even when working-class nonwhite women had a chance to take cooking lessons offered by social reformers in settlement houses, such“home” cooking was not necessarily a taste of their own home for theseimmigrant or nonwhite women. Furthermore, cooking advisers encouraged women to be “creative” cooks for the family by carefully following instructions and using processed foods.74 “Labor-saving” devices
did not dramatically lessen household burdens. Rather, middle-classhousewives came to assume more responsibility for housework, which
acquired an emotional signiﬁcance.
As many middle-class housewives came to confront new domestic
tasks, General Mills created Betty Crocker to provide them with all sortsof cooking advice. This ﬁctitious woman not only taught cooking skills

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and knowledge but also actively presented a model of the ideal woman
and home. At the same time, letters from customers to Betty Crocker
enabled the company to understand consumer needs and to develop new
products as well as marketing strategy. In this manner, this ﬁctitious
woman played a role as a mediator between the company and its customers.
Deriving her vision largely from the home economics movement,
Betty Crocker insisted on the importance of scientiﬁc cooking, such as
making accurate measurements and using precise baking temperatures,
which would enable women to always make “perfect” dishes. Science
was utilized to promote the reliability of General Mills products andrecipes, whose use was, according to Betty Crocker, the only correct way
to become an ideal mother/wife without failure. This ﬁctitious female
ﬁgure endorsed the company’s products and her own recipes, while
encouraging women to cook at home in order to offer their love to thefamily. She indicated that these baked products were not merely edible
objects but essential means for housewives to become ideal women.
Betty Crocker’s cooking advice and its relation to social conditions
explain how a food company advocated an ideal womanhood and gender norms by connecting home cooking and love.
The decrease in availability of domestic servants and the increase in
numbers of nuclear families contributed to sanctifying domestic work
for middle-class housewives, and women’s magazines and cookbooks
depicted housewifery as a digniﬁed task. With the changes in family
structures and relations, middle-class women were expected to fulﬁll
their families’ emotional needs through cooking meals. As kitchen appliances and processed foods became increasingly available, women’s productive work acquired more, not less, signiﬁcance. Social constructionof this “home cooking and love” discourse was closely associated withthe dynamic changes in American society in the early twentieth century.
The history of food/cooking and domesticity shows that ideal gendernorms became ﬁrmly embedded in people’s everyday lives.
NOTES
1
Susan Marks, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady ofFood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 42, 58.
2
Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology,
and Cookbooks in the 1950s,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 3 (Spring, 1999): 538.

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227

3
Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 4.
4
See Neuhaus, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” 546–47.
5
Parkin, Food Is Love.
6
Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 169–248; and “ ‘I Guarantee’: Betty Crocker and the
Woman in the Kitchen,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical
Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 29–61.
7
Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 202–40. Harvey Levenstein also
examines the impact of Betty Crocker in American food history and the food business
in Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 30, 36, 85–86, 102, 115–16; and in Revolution at
the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (1988; repr., Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2003), 155–56. See also Mary D. McFeely, Can She Bake a Cherry
Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 2000), 90–95.
8
Marks, Finding Betty Crocker.
9Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 32. Piggly Wiggly, which
opened in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, was the ﬁrst self-service grocery store in the
United State. By 1918 the Piggly Wiggly chain had stores in forty cities across the country. See Lisa C. Tolbert, “The Aristocracy of the Market Basket: Self-Service Food
Shipping in the New South,” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, ed.
Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2009), 179–95.
10Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity,
1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 14–22, 347–59.
11
Betty Crocker, Betty Crocker’s Family Dinners in a Hurry: Home-Tested Menus
That Make the Most of Minutes (New York: Golden Press, 1973). The consumer researchby Ernest Dichter in the 1950s concludes that “women tend to see Betty Crocker in termsof their own self-image, characteristics, desires, wants and needs.” The research categorized women into three different types: the pure homemaker, the career type, and thebalanced woman. The ﬁnding shows that these different types of women had different
perceptions of Betty Crocker. Institute for Research in Mass Motivations, Inc., A
Psychological Research Study on the Effectiveness of Betty Crocker in Promoting
General Mills Products, 1953, box 2407/8, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington,
Delaware.
12
James Gray, Business without Boundary: The Story of General Mills (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 172; and Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 9–14.
See also Susan Marks, “Betty Crocker: Marketing the Modern Woman,” Hennepin
History 58, no. 2 (1999): 4–19.
13
Gray, Business, 173.
14
Marchand, Advertising, 9–16, 115. See also Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 89–123.
For “personiﬁcation” of advertisements, see Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A
Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 174.
15
Gray, Business, 176. See also Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 29–38.

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16
Ruth G Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes, the 1930s,” Leslie L. Anderson and Family
Papers, 1883–1981, box 144/C/19/1B, Minnesota History Center, Minnesota Historical
Society, St. Paul.
17
Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 37, 51.
18
Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 33.
19Gray, Business, 174. See also Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 211–45; and Ai Hisano,“Betty Crocker no hyôshô to amerika shakai no hensen [Representation of Betty Crocker
and the transformation of American society],” Pacific and American Studies 9 (March2009): 128–41.
20
McFeely, Can She Bake, 3.
21
According to Lizabeth Cohen, by 1930 there was one radio for every two or threehouseholds in workers’ neighborhoods in Chicago. In such an urban area, having a radio
was not a primary factor that affected the listenership of the Betty Crocker program,
since the working-class could afford the radio set. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal:
Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 129–37.
22
Although American society then was hostile to the idea of working mothers/wives,
the reality was that many nonwhite women continued to stay in the labor force after marriage because of economic necessity. In 1920, 58.8% of single and 32.5% of married
nonwhite women were in the workforce. On the other hand, among white women, labor
force participation rates of single and married women were 45.0% and 6.5% respectively. Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why
They Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 206. See also S. J.
Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830–1945 (London: MacMillan, 1999), 112,
133, 207–17.
23
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 21 September 1925, radio script,
General Mills Archives, Minneapolis.
24
Ellen M. Plante, The American Kitchen 1700 to the Present: From Hearth toHighrise (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 168, 229, 252–53; and Priscilla J. Brewer,
From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America (NewYork: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 232, 234. See also Susan Strasser, Never Done:
A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 40, 67–84;
James C. Williams, “Getting Housewives the Electric Message: Gender and Energy
Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century,” in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption,
and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1998), 95–113.
25
Strasser, Never Done, 81. In the United States as a whole, 16% of dwelling units
had electric service in 1912, 35% had it in 1920, and 68% in 1930. As electric service
spread to more households, the price of electricity dropped: from nine cents a kilowatt
hour in 1912 to seven and a half cents in 1920, and to six cents in 1930. However, people spent more money on electricity because they installed more lights, bought more
appliances, and used more current. The average annual use per customer doubled
between 1912 and 1930. See also Katherine Leonard Turner, “Tools and Spaces: Foodand Cooking in Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880–1930,” in Belasco and Horowitz,
Food Chains, 217–32.
26
Ibid., 264.
27
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books), 185.
28
Kleinberg, Women, 34, 170–71.

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229

29
Matthews, Just a Housewife, 145–46, 157. See also Levenstein, Revolution, 72–78;
and Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century,
2nd ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 32–43.
30
Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History ofAmerican Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 125; Matthews, Just a Housewife,
148; and Strasser, Never Done, 207.
31
Strasser, Never Done, 212. See also Levenstein, Revolution, 156, 198.
32
Kleinberg, Women, 172.
33
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 21 September 1925.
34
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
35
For instance, Clarence Birdseye, the pioneer of the frozen-food industry, received
a patent in 1925 for the new technique. By 1934, 39 million pounds of frozen food werebeing processed annually. Matthews, Just a Housewife, 179. For processed foods andfood companies, see Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press:
2001), esp., Christopher Holmes Smith, “Freeze Frames: Frozen Foods and Memoriesof the Postwar American Family,” 175–209; and Erika Endrijonas, “Processed Foods
from Scratch: Cooking for a Family in the 1950s,” 157–73.
36
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
37
Betty Crocker’s Radio Program, NBC, 1 April 1932, radio script, General Mills
Archives, Minneapolis.
38
Ibid.
39
For the Betty Crocker Kitchen, see Karen Leonard, “The Betty Crocker Kitchens:
Temptations for Every Taste,” Family 2, no. 2 (1978): 6–13; and Nancy A. Miller,“Kitchen Conﬁdential,” Architecture Minnesota 30, no. 5 (2004): 44–47.
40
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 21 September 1925.
41
Betty Crocker Service Program, NBC, 5 June 1936, radio script, General Mills
Archives, Minneapolis.
42
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
43
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 2 October 1924, radio script,
General Mills Archives, Minneapolis.
44
Margolis, Mothers, 135; and Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home
Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 51, 153. The total number of women employed in domestic labordecreased in the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, although the actual number ofhousehold servants increased from 1,509,000 in 1900 to 2,025,000 in 1930. Since there
was a supply of African American women who worked as domestics in the South, there
was a regional difference in the degree of declining numbers of servants. Matthews, Justa Housewife, 179.
45
Cowan, More Work, 175; Neuhaus, Manly Meals, 51; and Levenstein, Revolution,
157.
46
Cowan, More Work, 175; Kleinberg, Women, 237; and Margolis, Mothers, 153. See
also Matthews, Just a Housewife, 95–100.
47
Matthews, Just a Housewife, 177. Between 1910 and 1920, while the urban population increased from 42,064,001 to 54,253,282, the rural population increased from50,164,495 to 51,768,255. U.S. Census Bureau, “Urban and Rural Populations, 1790 to
1990,” Census of Population and Housing Table 4, 1990, http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/ﬁles/table-4.pdf.
48
Levenstein, Revolution, 161–64; and Neuhaus, Manly Meals, 12–16, 49–52.

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49
Levenstein, Revolution, 19, 62. See also Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 44–66. There
were also cooking schools for domestic servants and working-class women.
50
Matthews, Just a Housewife, 21; and Levenstein, Revolution, 62. By the end of thenineteenth century, there was little discernible difference in the literacy rates of the twosexes.
51
Margolis, Mothers, 154–55.
52
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
53
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 2 October 1924.
54
Ibid.
55
Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 66.
56
Plante, American Kitchen, 241.
57
Kleinberg, Women, 243; and Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 115. The
term “companionate marriage” was ﬁrst introduced to the public by Denver juvenile
court judge Ben B. Lindsay and Wainright Evans in their 1925 book, Revolt of Modern
Youth. See also Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 209–14.
58
Matthews, Just a Housewife, 192.
59
Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 125. See also Margolis, Mothers,
135–36; Strasser, Never Done, 104–24; and Cowan, More Work.
60
Matthews, Just a Housewife, 181–84; Strasser, Never Done, 224–41; Kleinberg,
Women, 234–37; and Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 115–17.
61
Betty Crocker’s Radio Program, NBC, 1 April 1932.
62
Marks, Finding Betty Crocker, 68.
63
Ibid., 69.
64
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
65
Kleinberg, Women, 238. See also Cowan, More Work, 177.
66
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
67
For a home party and dainty meals, see Sherrie A. Inness, Dinner Roles: American
Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), esp. chap.
3.
68“Mrs. James Lindsay to Betty Crocker, 15 August 1936,” Leslie L. Anderson andFamily Papers, 1883–1981.
60
The Gold Medal Flour Home Service Talk, WCCO, 2 October 1924.
70
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
71
Betty Crocker Service Program, NBC, 5 June 1936.
72
Anderson, “Betty Crocker Notes.”
73
Margolis, Mothers, 208–9. See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct:
Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
245–96; Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in
America, 1875–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).
74
See Endrijonas, “Processed Foods from Scratch.”