A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee and Dominica Tang
Hello, fellow Musers! For today’s post, I have invited another Museum Studies colleague, Dominica Tang, to chat with me about how the museum enacted gender roles within the framework of 1960s food programming in Toronto. More specifically, we will be taking a look at the workshops and demonstrations organized by the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and comparing them with some of the activities offered by the newly founded Black Creek Pioneer Village (BCPV), which opened to the public in 1957. Our discussion is inspired by Joan Sangster's article "Creating Popular Histories: Re-Interpreting "Second Wave" Canadian Feminism," and Irina D. Mihalache's “Recipes as Culinary Communication in a Canadian Art Museum: Lobster Souffle, Beef Stroganoff, and the Tensions of Gourmet Cooking in the 1960s."
During the 1960s, the AGO – then known as the Art Gallery of Toronto – held a series of cooking workshops and demonstrations, organized by a group of female volunteers known as the Women’s Committee. Famously, the Women’s Committee invited celebrated chefs, such as Dione Lucas and James Beard, to share their knowledge and training of gourmet cooking with a Canadian audience.
Conversely, the female volunteers at BCPV worked to demonstrate historic methods of cooking – ones that did not necessarily coincide with contemporary understandings of culinary expertise. In this case, knowledge was disseminated in a manner that was less formal, sometimes creating a romanticized portrait of Canadian life during the nineteenth century. However, as will be shown, this portrait also reflected 20th century understandings of gender roles and the domestic sphere at large.
Jordan: So Dominica, how did a place like BCPV come to represent a time other than the 19th century?
Dominica: Museums are a product of their time. Living history museums, such as BCPV, may represent and interpret a past time period, but their rationale and methodology is grounded in their contemporary environment and ideologies.
In 1960s Ontario, there was a push towards increased industrial and commercial capacity, which caused many women to leave the domestic sphere and enter into the professional world. The 1960s also saw somewhat of a reinforcement of gender roles, especially in suburban areas, which is reflected in some of the programming offered at Black Creek. In the 21st century, BCPV has softened these rules greatly. During my employment with BCPV, I cooked, cleaned, and spun wool as a Victorian farm wife would, but you would also find me in the tinsmith shop piercing tin squares or in the doctor’s office showcasing 19th century splints and stethoscopes. Additionally, my pixie cut at the time did not conform with the typical feminine Victorian style, so I covered it at all times with a house cap or bonnet.
Jordan: Although BCPV was certainly envisioned as an historical site, it represented an idealized construction that in many ways mirrored contemporary social values. While it was built as a reaction against rapid modernization, it also helped to strengthen existing gender roles in that it offered a space for female volunteers to teach female visitors about domestic practices. In this way, the programming at BCPV mirrored the cooking demonstrations taking place at the AGO.
Dominica: Both programs served as a means to assert gender identities through the improvement of culinary skills in different ways. The food programs at BCPV were, in the participants’ imaginations, models for imparting and reinforcing gender roles for their children. The motivation for women partaking in the culinary program at the AGO was to become better hosts as part of their duties as middle-class housewives. By offering a historical perspective, the female interpreters at BCPV were attempting to reiterate and reinforce the superiority of modern lifestyles. They, moreover, compared the laborious and time consuming mode of preheating a wood-fired brick oven to a simple push of the button on their stoves at home. I often did in my interpretation while the visitors watched me chuck yet another log into the fire and wipe the sweat off my brow. The AGO also sought to maintain this superiority but through a more direct manner by partnering up with the Consumer’s Gas Company and Canada’s Packers’ ltd.
Both the AGO and BCPV were maintaining the division of domestic labour, and offering female participants the opportunity to improve their own lives through the use of more efficient technologies, both in regard to the packaging and the preparation of food items. In order to understand the role of women in the 1960s, it is crucial to remember that agency does not simply come from rebellious or transgressive behaviour, rather these women were exercising agency by choosing to actively participate in the improvement of their own lives. Saba Mahmood, in her discussion on the Egyptian Islamic Revival, terms this understanding as “docile agency.”
Jordan: Still, it does seem that the AGO offered a less restrictive environment. The women who observed and participated in these cooking demonstrations were not as bound to the past as the female volunteers at BCPV. Rather than reframing the past through an understanding of the present, the AGO’s Women’s Committee worked to create new possibilities, which included modern techniques and ingredients. In addition, the gourmet cooking programs organized by the Women’s Committee were meant to elevate quotidian practices, often understood as mundane, into the realm of the miraculous.
Surprisingly, the AGO has not taken advantage of the 21st century obsession with all things food, which is reflected today in an almost total lack of food programming. BCPV, on the other hand, still offers butter churning workshops as part of school tours, and still keeps living animals on the farm. When I visited BCPV in 2018, I was quite surprised that these traditions had been maintained so carefully.
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| Posing Sheep at Black Creek Pioneer Village (Photograph Courtesy of Dominica Tang) |
While the programming offered at Black Creek Pioneer Village in the 1960’s was perhaps more traditional, it has nevertheless been sustained well into the 21st century. Although the workshops and demonstrations organized by the Women’s Committee were perhaps more innovative, they eventually died out either from increasing food costs or decreasing interest; we cannot be sure. In any case, it is quite evident that both of these institutions helped to cement and subvert power structures and gender roles at a time when the general social landscape was undergoing a drastic transformation.
