ninme

Telegraph - Flexible working could backfire on women. By Alice Thomson

So the next generation of women have quietly decided they don’t want to be Shirley Conran or Nicola Horlick. … Almost a quarter of nursery places are now vacant. The statistics are startling. In the last five years the number of women in senior management positions in the 350 biggest companies has fallen by 40 per cent, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. This partly explains why, according to the Office of National Statistics figures released yesterday, the pay gap between men and women has increased. Women are once again the junior employees, secretaries and canteen staff or sidelined part-timers.

As one female friend at an American bank commented: “I’m the only mother here now, I am surrounded by middle-aged men and 20-something giggling girls in mini dresses. It’s like the 1970s. Everyone is having affairs and being laddish because there are no sensible older women telling them to behave.”

A headteacher at a high-flying girls’ school says she finds herself in a predicament. “We used to tell all our girls they could become brain surgeons or Nasa scientists and many of them did. But they come back for reunions now and most of them have given up. It was too hard to be perfect at everything. I’m beginning to think we should just teach them to cook, paint and play the piano, so at least they have some hobbies while they are bringing up their children.”

That last line makes me either want to laugh or cry. The other day I was at a used bookstore and picked up a couple of old Time-Life Foods of the World volumes, one of which is The Cooking of Japan. Parts of it, even an anachronism like myself thinks is a bit much, for instance:

The family evening meal is much more complicated. For one thing, the Japanese housewife is often uncertain as to when her husband will arrive home, or whether he will show up tiddly or sober, well-fed or famished. (In working-class households this often depends on how long it has been since payday and whether Papa still has cash to splurge. But on the expense-account level, ok’san has no such guide to her husband’s probable condition.) Nevertheless, it is considered her wifely duty to wait up for him with a hot meal at the ready, no matter how late he returns.

I mean, I get that a lot of working class western families are like that too (probably with a higher probability of throwing things, though), but this isn’t a sociology book, it’s a cookbook. But! Even with that, there’s this, a few pages earlier, after explaining why, as a westerner, you’re unlikely ever to be invited over to someone’s house (it’s a lot to do with humility and honour and stuff):

Despite the fact that the Japanese housewife has little audience for her culinary skill, the meals she provides her family are delectable, various and nourishing. For one thing, she has probably studied home economics in school and then attended cooking classes (as well as lessons in flower arranging and the tea ceremony) in that period after finishing her schooling when a Japanese girl is formally prepared for marriage. Even after marriage she is likely to be enrolled in one of the many flourishing cooking schools that can be found in every town and city in Japan. Some of these schools are so successful that they own big buildings on downtown streets, publish exquisitely illustrated cookbooks, run their own TV programs, teach Chinese and Western cooking as well as Japanese, and even sponsor correspondence courses.

Many housewives belong to cooking clubs that invite a different chef to lecture and demonstrate every week, and still others eagerly take note of the recipes and cooking hints that come to them regularly in a strady barrage, from women’s magazines, TV and radio, and neighborhood ladies’ organizations. It is safe to say that the Japanese ok’san (”honorable interior one,” i.e. housewife) spends more time and thought on food than does her American counterpart.

(Btw, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen okusan translated that way, which is how I would translate it, but everywhere else (published more recently, it should be noted) translates it as “a person deep inside (the house)” which is just a teensy bit less appreciative.)

So of course you’ve got all these Westerners tut-tutting about this (the cookbook was published in 1969), but then a generation later in Britain all these Western women are thinking “Screw this” and their old teachers are wondering if they should have taught them how to cook because now they’re all so bored.