Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture, and: Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, and: The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (review)

Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture by Amy L. Best. New York: Routledge Press, 2000, 228 pp., $19.95 paper.

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century by Mary Drake McFeely. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, 194 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader edited by Jennifer Scanlon. New York: New York University Press, 2000, 397 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $22.50 paper.

Skillfully, using a myriad of information sources and thorough qualitative analysis techniques, Amy Best takes the reader to the site of a complex interaction of gender, race, class, and sexuality, namely the high school prom. Prom Night looks at past and present cultural expressions that take this rite of passage to almost mythic heights of significance in the adolescent's life and seamlessly blends these with the personal experiences of prom-goers who strive for that perfect night with increasingly extravagant expenditures. The historical significance of the prom as a homogenizing white, middle-class, heterosexual ideal in twentieth-century America, along with its accompanying symbols, rituals, and artifacts, is juxtaposed with the participant's struggle to engage in meaningful self-representation and originality.

Here at the prom we see U.S. commodity culture, the tension brought on by coming-of-age rebellion/conformity, marketing opportunism, and traditional gender role-playing at its best. The changes evidenced over time in the prom-as-ritual mirror the political and commercial forces at work in American culture. For example, the alternative gay proms popping up in city high schools around the country point to the inherent dissatisfaction and sense of exclusion many youths have felt, and continue to feel with this adolescent experience—an experience that has come to represent the culmination of youth. The integration of diverse multicultural tastes, styles, and music into the prom meets with conflict and resistance from the old school, shored up by media and myth. This book represents a rich terrain to study and teach about the ever changing gendered, commercialized, conflicted cultural tapestry we know as America.

Get ready to devour an appetizing history of women's role as food preparer over the past century in Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Using cookbooks as her primary source, McFeely deftly runs through the changing meaning of and practices used in American cooking, from farm kitchens with wood-fed cast-iron stoves to the modern convenience-driven, appliance-filled kitchens of today. The changing ideologies behind kitchen work, the philosophies underlying food preparation and consumption, and the resulting expectations placed on women are what emerge from this text to feed the feminist researcher's belly. The blending of diverse ethnic styles into an Americanized standard of white, middle-class blandness comes out in the recipes.

In the quintessentially female domain of the kitchen, women struggle to feed and nurture their families, subject to an ever-changing array of tools, ingredients, tastes, information, technology, and outside direction. From women in pre-industrialized homes, to household managers who rose to the cause of depression or war, to scientifically-managed modernized consumers, to nutrition-conscious mothers, to working women focused on convenience, to today's sophisticated cooking for pleasure and fun (á la Martha Stewart), women have been judged by their performance in the kitchen. The history in this book is spiced up with numerous recipes, kitchen lore, and personal stories from the author's wide and rich cooking and research experience. Without realizing it, the reader eagerly digests this easy read and is simultaneously nourished with an understanding of a number of complex socio-cultural concepts and significant historical developments for American households that impact daily on the lives of women.

While the...