Archive for November, 2009

This year I attempted to make my first big turkey dinner. The holiday meal has long been one of those womanly rites of passage, viewed as complicated and requiring days of preparation and moving parts, more dishes that can fit on a table, and a skilled cook.

Since I’ve spent the past year studying time use, though, I wondered if maybe Thanksgiving could be done better–in a way that tasted wonderful, but didn’t involve too much labor. My family wanted to go watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the morning, and I didn’t want to stay home, chained to the stove. Plus with a nursing baby and a 2-year-old, there simply weren’t going to be long stretches of uninterrupted cooking time. My husband planned to do an equal (if not greater) amount of cooking, but again, with the two small kids, we were going to be trading off kid and cooking duties most of the day.

So what to do? As I learned from writing 168 Hours, you can save many hours by planning ahead and thinking things through. I took a quick look through my stash of November and December magazines to find the easiest, but best looking holiday recipes I could. I streamlined the dinner to what we consider essentials: turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, corn bread, green beans, cranberry sauce, and pecan pie. I chose recipes, and ordered the ingredients from Fresh Direct, which delivered our frozen 12-lb turkey late Sunday, in time to thaw in the fridge for Thursday. I could have bought the whole dinner ready-made, but decided just to take that approach on the pie.

At the same time that I was doing all this, I was reading through some December 1959 women’s magazines—Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, etc.—for a column I planned to write. Juxtaposing my menu planning with this task made one social trend very clear to me: we have clearly moved from a fussy, casserole- or gelatin-based cuisine to one that focuses on enhancing the food itself.

Modern recipes and 1959 recipes don’t seem to consider the same things ideal at all. We value fewer, better ingredients. My cranberry sauce was just cranberries, apple cider and sugar. It never occurred to me to mix it with Jell-O and put it in a mold. How would this have improved it? My green beans did not in any way involve onion rings or cream of mushroom soup. Green beans are good on their own, or maybe with some almonds at most. Though we didn’t do sweet potatoes, my 2009 magazines had a refreshing lack of marshmallows in their recipes; one enticing one was just sliced sweet potatoes in olive oil, salt, honey and chili peppers. My mashed potatoes featured nothing but potatoes, milk, butter, salt and grated Parmesan cheese. The most complicated dish was the stuffing, and even this we got down to mostly simple ingredients: bread, celery, mushrooms, onions, stock, herbs and an egg. The turkey got a rub of butter, garlic and herbs. Throw in a bottle of wine, and you have a feast—albeit a far different feast than the Christmas dinner described in the 1959 Woman’s Day, which features “Lime Charlotte Russe” with green Jell-o, meringue, and a double-boiler cream mixture, and “Blanc Mange with Jelly” with red Jell-o and another double-boiler cream mixture. Those dishes take a long time and many bowls to prepare, which just have to be washed, with unclear dividends. We, on the other hand, didn’t have many pots to scrub at all.

My Thanksgiving cooking experience was broadly emblematic of what I call “the new home economics.” Over the past 40 years, the amount of time American women devote to housework (which includes cooking) has fallen precipitously. Some of that is due to technology and modern conveniences; 40 years ago, obviously, you couldn’t order groceries online and have them delivered whenever you wanted. Though we didn’t use the microwave for our Thanksgiving dinner, having a quick way to reheat something makes timing less critical.

But most of the differences are more cultural than technological. A side benefit from shifting from fussy casserole and Jell-o dishes is that food is not only healthier but is far simpler to make. Nothing shows this better than one “Rice Imperial” recipe from the December 1959 Ladies Home Journal. With its rice, candied fruits and (of course) gelatin, it’s touted as great for sweet tooths. It’s also apparently great for people with a ton of time on their hands. Though women’s magazines were, in the 1950s, years from alerting readers to the exact amount of “hands on” and “total” time recipes took, the editors did put a flag on this dish. It honestly appears to take 8 hours, and so the magazine includes “a word of warning: don’t imagine you can whip it up between the lunch dishes and your 3 p.m. dentist appointment.”

That line, right there, sums up a big chunk of what has changed on the home front. For starters, whose busy day includes lunch dishes and a 3pm dentist appointment? Very few modern women are at home between lunch and 3pm and planning to spend that time cooking anyway. On week days, most are doing paid work. If they are at home, generally it’s because they’re taking care of small children, an activity that doesn’t mix well with an 8-hour recipe. On weekends, the average modern Ladies Home Journal reader is still doing other things – likely with her children (think sports games and the like) – whether she is in or out of the workforce. Modern women are no longer looking to fill time with elaborate dishes whose main function, as the 1959 LHJ says, is “to make a great show.” They value their time more, and so they spend it on higher value activities, like paid work and interacting with their children. According to time diaries, American women spend a lot more time playing with and reading to their kids these days than they did in the middle of the 20^th century, when far more of them were at home full-time.

And so the standard of what is considered good cooking has changed. In Family Circle’s December 2009 issue, the editors advise “Instead of baking treats, follow Willy Wonka’s lead and keep a tantalizing assortment of candy within reach.” I’d rather have a few pieces of chocolate from a sampler with a glass of port than Rice Imperial any day. In 1965, American moms spent 34.5 hours per week on housework. These days, they spend less than 20. Moms like me who work full-time spend about 14.5 hours per week.

I’d say this is a positive development for everyone except the makers of Jell-o. As it is, the net result of the simple cooking philosophy is that I not only got to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with my kids, I got to go for a run and, of course, tend to the needs of my 2-month-old infant. Time – all 168 hours of it – has to be filled with something. I’d argue that the shift from housekeeping to paid work, children and personal time is a major victory for women (before we even get to the fact that many of our husbands are now taking their turn in the kitchen). And given that dark chocolate squares are much tastier than Lime Charlotte Russe, it’s hard to see that anything meaningful has been lost.

One more post for today! I am quoted in a white paper from Ad Age on marketing to moms. Drawing on the “Core Competency Mom” series that I wrote for The Huffington Post, I talk about the genius of claiming that products that reduce housework time give you more time with your kids. This allows marketers to claim that paper plates make you a good mom!

Update 11/20: Executive Moms picked up on the Ad Age white paper in their email newsletter, the Executive Momorandum, and highlighted how I’d coined the term “core competency mom.” They also mentioned a great phrase, “delegating to Dixie,” about how moms cut themselves some slack on the housework front in order to focus their energies on their paid work and nurturing their kids. I will definitely start using that one!

My review of the book, Connected, ran on City Journal’s website today under the title “You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato.”

My column, “Give Thanks for Job Creators,” ran in today’s USA Today. The gist is that this Thanksgiving, we should be especially grateful to people who created jobs in 2009. And to be wary of politicians who want to collect (or even hike!) taxes in order to fund job creation schemes. Why not just leave the money with people who create jobs in the first place?

When First Lady Michelle Obama made the cover of some editions of Glamour magazine last week in a sleeveless red dress with a necklace as sparkly as her smile, it wasn’t for her undeniable good looks. She won the spot as part of the magazine’s annual Women of the Year awards, honoring the world’s female movers and shakers.

Katie Couric, who interviewed Obama for the December issue, notes that “I couldn’t imagine a list of 2009 Women of the Year that didn’t acknowledge America’s First Lady.” Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, on her blog, called Obama’s inclusion a “very, very, very easy choice to make.”

I’m not so sure it should have been.

Michelle Obama has broken barriers, but she still represents a rather old-fashioned notion that the female route to power is to marry it – one it’s puzzling that Glamour would promote.

Though filled with the usual clothes and sex tips, Glamour has done an admirable job of stretching the genre of women’s magazines, honoring, for instance, ambitious young women through its annual Top 10 College Women list. The magazine prides itself on its feminist sentiments, and endorsed Al Gore in 2000 out of worries that George W. Bush would limit abortion rights.

In that vein, the purpose of the Women of the Year project is to show Glamour’s young readers that they can do anything. They can speak up for justice (as the Iranian women honored this year have done). They can be Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice in 2008), House Minority Leader and then Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi in 2002), executives at major companies (Marissa Mayer of Google this year), or even break the glass ceiling in that very male-dominated profession, comedy (Amy Poehler). Sure, some in-the-news celebrities (Rihanna) get put on the list to garner headlines, though these women have generally done something (e.g., top the charts) in their own right.

That’s what makes the First Lady a curious choice. With degrees from Princeton and Harvard, she could have run for office herself. She could have used her law degree to rise through the ranks of judges to land on the Supreme Court. She could have had a pioneering business career, perhaps becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. She could have started a company or a national non-profit.

She didn’t do any of that.

Instead, though she’s held many prestigious (and well-paying) jobs, overall, she kept her personal ambitions relatively limited in order to spend time with her girls and run the home front while her husband advanced his career, first in the Illinois state senate, later as a U.S. Senator, and of course, during his epic campaign for the presidency.

There’s reason to believe she wasn’t thrilled with the sacrifices this required (The Audacity of Hope recounts her complaints) but she did it, nonetheless, and there is nothing wrong with putting your husband’s career first. It’s a choice many women make. It certainly paid off for her, as evidenced by the Obamas’ multimillion dollar net worth and the platform she now has to promote the causes she cares about.

But because of her choices, the First Lady is on the national public stage mainly because she is the wife of a famous man. Unlike, say, Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin, who built their own power bases and public careers, the only reason you’ve heard of the brilliant Michelle Obama is that she married a man named Barack.

Is this the message Glamour wants to send to its readers? The fact that Barack, not Michelle, holds the office of president belies Couric’s statement in Glamour that Mrs. Obama is “a powerful symbol of our nation’s progress.”

In a year in which five women won Nobel Prizes alongside the First Lady’s husband, Glamour could have done better.

My review of Lee Eisenberg’s Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer will Keep On Buying No Matter What ran in the Wall Street Journal today.