Mary M., of Cooking with the Junior League (go read it now! It’s awesome!) sent in photos she took of several pages from House Dressing, a cookbook published by the Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society in 1978 (Hancock Park is a wealthy section of L.A.). The cookbook contains a section called “Kitchen Spanish,” which, as Mary says, “pretty much amounts to phrases you can use to boss around your help.” They are quite thorough, providing terms not just for cooking but for many other household tasks, and specific terms for wool vs. silk clothing. Here are images of a couple of the pages:

And here we have my favorites, “This is still dirty” and “Do it very thoroughly this time”:

And to think, when I first read the phrase “Kitchen Spanish” I assumed it was a geographically confused title for the Tex-Mex recipe section. Also, given that the pronunciation guides don’t include instructions on which syllable to emphasize, I can only imagine what kind of directions the employees actually received.

It made me think of the book Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. She discusses the tensions and conflicts that often arise between immigrant (largely Latina) housekeepers/nannies and their (mostly White and female) wealthy employers over how tasks should be done. Domestic workers generally expressed a wish to be told what to do, but not how to do it (and not watched while they worked), while employers felt they had to provide a lot of micromanagement if they wanted tasks done to their standards. Many instances where employees quit or employers fired them resulted from the conflict over this issue.

My guess would also be that many of the individuals contributing to and buying this cookbook would not be cooking anything from it themselves. The cookbook probably served as a form of symbolic domesticity for wealthy women to share recipes, while the women doing much of the actual cooking and cleaning in their households were present only implicitly as the recipients of the instructions on these pages. As Mary pointed out, something similar was probably true of all the “signature recipes” of First Ladies are often shown serving in photo ops–it seems likely that many of them had nothing to do with the preparation and may not have even supplied the recipe. Didn’t John McCain’s wife (I know, not a First Lady, but she was a hopeful) post a recipe on the campaign website that turned out to be taken from another cooking website?

NEW! (July ’10): Jason K. sent in another example, this one published in 1976:

Our friend Jason S. is in Tokyo this week.  He reports that designing and assembling dolls is a popular hobby there.  The photograph he sent us shows that doll bodies come in three sizes: small, medium, and large.  Unfortunately that doesn’t suggest acceptance of a diversity of body types, nor does it allow for a just-my-size version, unless you’re talking only about boobs:

By the way, Jason will be back from Tokyo in time to come to OUR PARTY ON SUNDAY (August 9th at 6pm at Johnny Foley’s Irish Housein San Francisco, CA)!  We hope you can come!

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Ideal bodies vary across cultures and time.   In the U.S. today, childhood obesity is considered a significant social problem and is widely covered in the news, on talk shows, and the like.  When food was more scarce, however, having a fat child was a sign of health and well-being.  This ad, from 1898, is for a tonic that will fatten up your child.  How times change.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Carl G. sent in this cartoon, found at Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom, that ran during the 1864 Presidential election campaign and played on voters’ fears of racial mixing:

The following text accompanied the cartoon:

The Miscegenation Ball at the Headquarters of the Lincoln Central Campaign Club, Corner of Broadway and Twenty Third Street New York Sept. 22d. 1864 being a perfect fac simile of the room &c. &c. (From the New York World Sept. 23d. 1864). No sooner were the formal proceedings and speeches hurried through with, than the room was cleared for a “negro ball,” which then and there took place! Some members of the “Central Lincoln Club” left the room before the mystical and circling rites of languishing glance and mazy dance commenced. But that Many remained is also true. This fact We Certify, “that on the floor during the progress of the ball were many of the accredited leaders of the Black Republican party, thus testifying their faith by works in the hall and headquarters of their political gathering. There were Republican Office-Holders, and prominent men of various degrees, and at least one Presidential Elector On The Republican Ticket.

I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen, so it’s good to see that outright lying in political campaigns isn’t new.

It’s interesting that all the couples feature White men and Black women. Usually opponents to abolition or desegretation depicted White women with Black men, sometimes voluntarily, other times showing Black men as sexually aggressive predators who threaten White women’s virtue.

And of course, while they weren’t generally having “Negro balls,” many White men at the time were sexually involved with Black women, often (though not always) women they owned as slaves and who had little ability to say no to, or do anything about, their sexual advances. So the real outrage here would be not so much that White men were having (often coercive) sex with Black women, but that Black women and White men would be couples, socializing openly and in a situation of “universal freedom” that would put Black women on a more equal footing relative to their White partners (or, anyway, closer to the level of equality White women had with White men, which was more than Black women had but clearly left a lot to be desired).

On another note, Carl points out that even though this is a cartoon meant to incite fears of racial mixing among Whites, the African American women are not drawn in a way that makes them look grotesque or monstrous like so many cartoons at the time did.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Lisa recently asked, “What warrants a slide show on a newspaper’s website?” Denise L. sent in an article from the Life section of the Globe and Mail website called “Obsession with Aging Female Parts Has Created a New Body Lexicon” that brings up similar questions about what topics are given attention. The article states,

Ladies of a certain age, the best that can be said is, welcome. Congratulations are not necessarily in order…

Such is women’s obsession with the tyranny of their aging bodies – some might even call it a body dysmorphic disorder – that they develop names for the various age-signifying bits that can seem as offensive as teenage behaviour, prompting a need for strict control (in this case intervention in the form of diet, exercise, cream, injection or scalpel).

The names suggest annoyance, never love or fondness of the type men have for some of their parts.

Which is unfortunate. Don’t you love your teenager, despite his long, greasy hair? The cure, ladies, is to laugh. To wit, a list of the best names for the worst afflictions.

We then have images to illustrate aging and the names giving to aging body parts. Here are a few. Vampire Dinner Lips:

Quilting Pattern:

Suitcase Knees (because they’re “padded and bulky”):

Crepey Cleavage (presumably looks like a crepe?)

Crow’s Feet:

Huh. I wonder why women don’t see to express “love or fondness” for their aging bodies the way the article claims many men do (something I find doubtful).

The article presents itself as an antidote to women’s obsession with their bodies and aging, a way to help women laugh and accept their bodies. But the images that accompany it, clearly meant to make the figures into objects of ridicule, make it hard to imagine how they would achieve such an objective. Reading it just made me aware of all kinds of things I’d never heard of or particularly noticed before. And in a larger sense, the question, as with the slide shows of scantily clad women, is why this is news? And why pretend the article is about helping women accept their bodies through humor, which I don’t think it does?

PARTY!

Please join us for the first ever Sociological Images party! We’d love to see all of you–sociologists and non-sociologists alike–in San Francisco on Sunday, August 9th at 6pm at Johnny Foley’s Irish House.   We want to meet you and we think it’d be super cool for you to meet each other, too.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Sociological Images was born in July of 2007.  In honor of our birthday, we point you to our very first post ever:  Faith Hill re-touched for the cover of Redbook.

One year later, we published a fascinating example of the white man’s burden.  This time, however, it’s a white woman’s burden in the form of a Pampers commercial.  It’s something; you should check it out.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW!):

We added a third PostSecret postcard where someone confesses thoughts about race, while explaining that they are not racist.  Ponder them here.

Our post about an Icelandic cartoon that portrayed Barack Obama as a cannibal now includes an image of the comic book graphic novel Barack the Barbarian, thanks to sender-inner Lindsay.

Phil Howard had some updated graphs on concentration of organic brands, so we updated our post on who sells organics.

To our post featuring ads that portray men as animals, we added an advertising campaign by Jim Beam that suggests men are “stags” (has there ever been a word with more meanings?).

In another food-related update, Amanda C. and Dmitriy T.M. both sent us material that we added to our post about sexualizing food.

Natalie sent us links to some images of kids’ t-shirts with sexual slogans, which we added to our existing post on the topic.

At the suggestion of Glenn R., we added ads for Caramba Tequila to our not-so-subliminal sex and ejaculation imagery posts.  We also added an image to the latter post sent in by Jeff G. and a commercial for Creme d’Or ice cream Jay L. brought to our attention. The commercial is a doozy.

We added some very scandalous ads for hearing aids to our “sex sells” post.

Rachel McC. J., from Deeply Problematic, sent us another example of efforts to protect women by telling women to protect themselves instead of targeting badly behaving men.  We added it to our previous post telling women to stop men from sexually harassing them in the subway.

Tricia V. sent us another example of resistance to advertising that objectifies women.  In this one, from Haiti, someone scrawled “Women’s bodies are not merchandise” across a full-sized billboard.

The Huffington Post featured a slide show of billboards in New York called “Sex in the Sky.”  Kiera S. thought it would make a good addition to our “What Warrants a Slide Show” post.  We agreed.

We added a Volkswagen ad to our post on vintage advertising suggesting that women are horrible (horrible!) drivers.  See it here.

We added a vintage ad marketing Zippo lighters to “modern mothers” to our post featuring ads in which babies tell their moms to smoke Marlboros.

Before the “obesity epidemic,” kids were just chubby.  We added two additional material to our post featuring vintage ads selling clothes for “chubby” kids, one of them sent in by Holly M.

Women LOVE to clean!  We added a vintage ad to a previous post about the joy of women’s work.

We recently posted about a business called the Occasional Wife.  A blogger at The Grand Narrative pointed us to several companies along the theme of Hire-A-Hubby.  We added them to our original post on the social construction of “wife.”

We updated a post on gendered marketing of products with images of pink and blue scooters for the mobility impaired and a cordless screwdriver marketed to women by including a manicure set. Turns out it wasn’t very popular.

As I understand it, the leisure gap between men and women has largely to do with the fact that women spend more time taking care of children and (especially) the home. I don’t know if this applies internationally or not. In any case, here’s a graphic illustrating the leisure gap across 18 different countries (via Jezebel):

UPDATE: In the comments, Elena linked to the original OECD report, if you’d like to explore the methodology etc.

A big thanks to Cycles who went and looked it up.  A summary:

Chapter 2, “Special Focus: Measuring Leisure in OECD Countries,” answers most of the questions posed here about what is considered “leisure” and what is not.

Brief overview:

“The approach taken here is to divide time during the day into five main categories. These five-time categories are 1) Leisure, narrowly defined, 2) Paid work, 3) Unpaid work, 4) Personal care, and 5) Other time (uses of time which are either unaccounted for or undefined).”

and

“‘Paid work’ includes full-time and part-time jobs, breaks in the workplace, commuting to the workplace, time spent looking for work, time spent in school, commuting to and from school, and time spent in paid work at home. “Unpaid work” includes all household work (chores, cooking, cleaning, caring for children and other family and non-family members, volunteering, shopping, etc.). “Personal care” includes sleep, eating and drinking, and other household, medical, and personal services (hygiene, grooming, visits to the doctor, hairdresser etc.). “Leisure” includes hobbies, games, television viewing, computer use, recreational gardening, sports, socialising with friends and family, attending events, and so on. “Other time” includes all activities not elsewhere mentioned.”

… and then it goes into even MORE detail about specific activities within each of those five categories.

I highly recommend reading at least Chapter 2 if you have questions. It includes a fascinating backgrounder on past studies and how they categorized of time-use.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.