Back To The Kitchen, Beeeeee-atches!

1 Update

Via Orcinus:

Lawmakers look for ways to keep moms at home to strengthen families

Task force blames breakdown of traditional family for social ills

Rep. Steven Thayn and his wife, Sherry, raised eight children on their family farm. She stayed home, and they home-schooled several of their children before eventually sending them to local schools.

Thayn said more two-parent homes and fewer working mothers could be both a social and economic boon. The Emmett Republican sees the breakdown of the traditional family structure as the root of societal ills such as drug abuse, crime and domestic violence.

That's why, as chairman of the Idaho House of Representatives' Family Task Force, he and others are considering controversial solutions such as repealing no-fault divorce laws and finding ways to encourage mothers to stay home with their children.

Thank you, Rep. Thayn! The breakdown of society is all women’s fault, eh? Not the fault of the stupid white men who’ve been in charge of everything since, oh, well, forever? There are women clamoring to stay in bad marriages, eh? If only women couldn’t get divorced everything would be so much better, eh? Hey, Rep. Thayn: fuck you.

But it gets better:

The six-member task force was convened this year by Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney and has been meeting with the lofty goal of finding solutions to what they see as the decline of the Idaho family. Controversially, the group is using the typical family of 1950 as its benchmark, though Thayn says it's simply a baseline and not a suggestion that families were perfect in 1950.

I’m sure it goes without saying that their benchmark “typical” 1950s family is white. I think the black or Native American family experience in 1950 was considerably different from what these Idaho legislators are investigating. Just a guess.

I always wonder when this mythic yesteryear was, where women happily lived in servitude to their husbands and families. Memo to Rep. Thayn: “Leave It To Beaver,” “Donna Reed” and “Father Knows Best” were television shows! They were fiction! It wasn’t real.

I love men, and I especially love men who love for women to be free to pursue their lives as they see fit. I do not love the regressive legislators who are convinced we women would be happier and the world would be better off if only we did what we were told.

Face it, Reps. Thayn and Denney, the genie’s out of the bottle. Deal with it. Women will go back into the kitchen when it’s their choice, not some legislated mandate by a bunch of whiny-ass men who want their dinner on time. And I hope the good voters of Idaho know enough to drum these knuckle-dragging troglodytes out of office first chance they get.

[UPDATE]:

From Jack, in Comments, a few residents of Idaho have made their displeasure known with some strongly worded letters to the editor.

Farewell To Peg Bracken

I was surprised and saddened to read Peg Bracken’s obituary in yesterday’s New York Times. Peg Bracken wrote the “I Hate To Cook Book,” a huge bestseller that became a staple in the kitchens of early 1960s housewives. I guess I never knew that Bracken was a) a real person, unlike that other figurehead, Betty Crocker, who was a fake; and b) still alive, at least until this week.

The “I Hate To Cook Book” and the follow-up, The “I Hate To Housekeep Book,” were the kind of pre-feminist guides that let suburban ‘60s housewives know they weren’t alone in resenting “women’s work,” and that their suspicion that Donna Reed-style domestic bliss was a crock was, in fact, correct. These guides were “a taste of liberation,” as the Times obituary writer noted; I like to think they heralded the coming “women’s lib” movement.

With a barbed wit and jaded perspective, Bracken was the antithesis of Martha Stewart; IHTCB was for the kind of women we now see portrayed on "Mad Men,” pre-feminist housewives who seasoned a pot roast between drags on a cigarette and swigs on a martini, all the while wondering if this was it, this was the best life had to offer?

What other cookbook offered such advice as:

Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

Or,

When you arrive home in a dead heat with your family, it’s a good idea to set the table immediately. Then the children may stop screaming, and even your husband may relax a little believing things are further along than they are.

Ha! I’m sure my mother pulled that one on us more than once. When we got older, and we had to fend for ourselves, the IHTCB was indispensable for fast, easy dinners that didn’t involve tearing tinfoil off a plastic tray.

Sadly, IHTCB is out of print today. I understand why; the recipes call for large amounts of butter, cream and salt; they’re the kind of meals that have most people dialing their cardiologist after dinner these days. It was another era, a less heart-healthy one, to be sure. Still, in honor of Bracken and the out-of-print IHTCB, I thought I’d share one of her recipes here:

Peg Bracken’s Saturday Chicken

4-6 pieces of chicken
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 cup cream (don’t cheat and use milk; the cream makes a lot of difference)*
salt and garlic salt
paprika
chopped parsley

Take your chicken and salt and garlic salt it a bit, then paprika it thoroughly. Next, spred it out, in one layer, in a shallow baking pan. Dilute the soup with the cream, pour it over the chicken, and springke the chopped parsley preettily on top. Bake it, uncovered, at 350F for 1 1/2 hours.

* For the record, I did cheat and used 1/2 and 1/2, and also substituted fresh garlic for the garlic salt. It was still plenty rich, almost too rich, though Mr. Beale still says its one of the best meals he’s ever had.

The Hoax With The Most

We all suspected MarryOurDaughter.org was a hoax -- at least, I know we all hoped it was (though with movements like QuiverFull it’s hard to know).

Now Newsweek has interviewed the creator of the site. Yes it is a hoax--sort of:

As it turns out, Ordover’s intentions go deeper than poking fun. He says he was hired by a group of women from a local support group who'd been married out in similar fashions—and wanted to draw attention to a very real problem. Marriage laws vary by state in the U.S. and are often in conflict with statutory-rape laws, he says—meaning that, with parental permission, it's not uncommon to find girls as young as 13 married with children in states where the legal age of sexual consent is more like 17. "This is an issue that people are extremely complacent about, and I said, 'I think I can find a way to get people to care, or at least start talking about it'," Ordover says. He hopes the site will generate controversy and spur outraged readers to pressure their local legislators to elevate the marriage age.

The MarryOurDaughter site received 60 million hits in one week, according to the article; what’s truly creepy is the real e-mails the site received, like this one:

“Darling Makayla, Seeing your bright smile among the other girls on this site was a joy among joys—to see someone so obviously full of life and laughter made me keep coming back to your profile,” writes one suitor, who identifies himself as Mark B. “I want to provide you with everything you need, I want to have a partnership that will last a lifetime. You love to laugh, and I would love to make you laugh for the rest of our lives ... Please consider me as a husband.”

Makayla is the 15-year-old whose “bride’s price” was $24,995.

And then there's this e-mail:

Someone who appears to be a mother signing up her daughter writes that her 16-year-old, Elizabeth, is “uppity but very pretty, and says she wants to work for the United Nation when she grows up. She's a liberal, and extremely smart and needs a strong, Christian man to help guide her.” Her bride price: $45,000—set high, she says, “because we see this as an investment."

Of course, there’s no way of knowing if these e-mails are hoax responses, but I suspect at least a few are not.

There’s something truly wrong with a culture that still, after all this time, views women as property, incapable of making their own decisions, needing “guidance.” Baby's still got a long way to go.