A Food Feminist for Her Time
A Food Feminist for Her Time
The life and legacy of Marguerite Patten
A look back at the life of Marguerite Patten, a food educator with a theatric flair who changed both Britain’s wartime food system and the ways that femininity was understood in the post-war period.
This month’s Letter from the Editors is a guest post by Eleanor Boyle, a Vancouver-based educator and writer on food and its impacts on the environment and our health. I connected with Eleanor back in May while doing research for my podcast in our WAR issue on women’s food politics during WWII, which led me to an announcement for Eleanor’s new book, Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today. In one of our first email exchanges, Eleanor mentioned that one of her heroes from WWII Britain was a woman named Marguerite Patten, a “home economist” with the government food ministry who was dedicated throughout the war and beyond to ameliorating the diets and health of millions of citizens. “Working in a traditionally ‘female’ role, she nevertheless could be said to have promoted a feminist cause — by serving as an example of the crucial nature of food systems and of so-called women’s work,” Eleanor wrote me. “Because no matter how much equipment and strategy a nation possesses, it can't win a war if its citizens are hungry.”
Unsurprisingly, our interest was piqued and we’re thrilled to have Eleanor here elaborating on Marguerite’s life and exploring the tensions of idolizing a purveyor of historically feminized labour.
With gratitude,
Isabela
By Eleanor Boyle
Shall we celebrate a woman in an apron whose fame derived from teaching other women to cook? Although the answer should always be yes, when the person in question is Marguerite Patten, my response is even more resounding. I have considered Patten an important wartime leader since discovering her through my research on the 1940s. Under the spectre of European conflict, Britain’s wartime food project, led by the national Ministry of Food to make the country food-secure amid the crisis, sparked a transformation of British agriculture and Britons’ diets. Britain needed authoritative educators to help citizens navigate food shortages and rationing rules. Marguerite Patten became the best known of these. Her story, like others in the Feminist Food Journal’s June 2022 WAR issue on conflict, gender, and food, shows how women, at so many important moments in history, have fought gendered constraints to make unique contributions to societal progress.
My analysis of the wartime British food project, as detailed in my new book, Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today, provides evidence that food systems can be remade, quickly, in the face of crisis. The changes seen in Britain support my thesis that today's food system, too, can be transformed if all actors join forces in doing so. During the wartime project, the government managed the food system, passed laws and implemented programs to decrease vulnerable imports, increase domestic production, minimize food waste, and share scarce foods through rationing. Citizens would eat mostly simple meals with local ingredients, and consume more vegetables and less meat, processed foods, and sweets. The changes to the food system were one way citizens fought the war on the home front.1 By redirecting key resources toward the military and keeping citizens healthy to fight a war, the food programs played a role in winning World War II for Britain and its allies.2 To accomplish that, citizens needed to “eat for victory” and Patten showed them how.
Born in 1915 near Bath, England in modest circumstances, Patten found herself helping in the kitchen in her early teens, after her father, a printer, passed away and her mother resumed a teaching career. Finding she enjoyed cooking, Patten took a foods course after high school and then landed work in private industry. One of her positions was with the appliance company Frigidaire, teaching people how to use the new technology of refrigerators. Patten had previously been interested in theatre work, and her cooking demonstrations were enhanced by her actor's presence.
Patten was then hired by the wartime Ministry of Food as an educator and consultant. She taught war-time cooking skills in diverse settings, from church basements to makeshift stalls in small-town markets, showing citizens countless ways to cook potatoes or to make tasty cakes without eggs. Soon chosen to run a busy food advice bureau in Harrods department store, she found that her audiences included wealthy women who had barely touched a frying pan, whose domestic help had found alternative wartime work opportunities.3 Energized by the challenge, Patten stayed in this role for years.
A woman expert in a gendered time
Working in 1940s Britain, Patten recognized the gendered realities of the home front. Women did the vast majority of household work, including shopping and managing family rations. Outside the home, they were paid less than men for similar work. But the era also offered new opportunities for women, and many took jobs as welders, truck drivers, and farm workers—while still managing household responsibilities.
In contrast to stereotypes at the time of kitchens as a naturally “female” domain, Patten understood that some women found cooking unpleasant and were annoyed or intimidated by the kitchen. So she encouraged shortcuts and assured cooks that meal preparation need not be complicated.4 Her meals tended to be quick to prepare, and her cookbooks included Classic Dishes Made Simple (1969).
After the war, Patten’s profile only increased. Regular appearances on the UK’s first TV magazine program, Designed for Women (1947-1960) and Cookery Club (1956-1961) made her one of the nation's first television chefs. Feminist media scholar Rachel Moseley suggests that these programs were significant "in constructing domestic British femininities in the postwar period".5 They produced a vision of British post-war womanhood as “simultaneously in the home and outside it”, both recognizing woman’s knowledge and skills while considering them trainees in domesticity. 6 Moseley notes that Patten herself had a feminist sensibility: She offered suggestions for managing complex tasks and underscored that domestic work required creativity and expertise.
In her personal style, Patten was unpretentious. Despite her growing renown and eventual stardom, Patten resisted the moniker of "celebrity chef", and on one occasion when she was introduced as such, she replied: "I am NOT. To the day I die, I will be a home economist." Her work extolled practicality and the "common sense of the war years, being clever about using up food."7 She valued thrift and deplored the trend toward the use of obscure ingredients that most citizens could neither afford nor obtain.8
A prolific author, she wrote about 170 cookbooks, including the two-million-copy seller Cookery in Colour (1963). One book was called We'll Eat Again: A Collection of Recipes from the War Years (1985), riffing off the wartime Vera Lynn song We'll Meet Again. Patten was still writing articles and books when she turned 85 in the year 2000. Frequently recognized and distinguished, including with the Order of the British Empire, she passed away in 2015 at the age of 99.
Food work as meaningful work
At first, I had mixed feelings about Patten because her arena of excellence was so achingly gendered. I'm a person who refused to enroll in high-school typing because I’d decided I was "never going to be a secretary" (then found myself in a computerized world where everyone needed to type!). And there was the meat thing. I'm a long-time and committed non-meat-eater, and Patten prepared a lot of flesh foods. Recognizing the ubiquity of a certain American pork product, she even wrote Spam: The Cookbook (2000).
But I quickly came to appreciate her. Not only was food education a feasible avenue of accomplishment for women of the day, but through her vision, Patten elevated food management as work of high value. She also reminds me of my forebears. She shares a similar name with my mother Marjorie, looks like my paternal grandmother, and was prodigiously talented like my maternal grandmother, who in her teens was such a skilled seamstress that she employed others to assist.
Besides, I too have taken roads most travelled by women, in teaching and food. My books, the recent Mobilize Food! as well as High Steaks: Why and How to Eat Less Meat, are the result of my activism in the food space. I’m grateful for the learnings I’ve gleaned from my women ancestors who spent much of their time in kitchens.
Further reading
Boyle, Eleanor. High Steaks: Why and How to Eat Less Meat. British Columbia (BC): New Society Publishers, 2012. eleanorboyle.com/pages/high-steaks
Boyle, Eleanor. Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today. Victoria, B.C.: FriesenPress, 2022. mobilizefood.org
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While ensuring that the home front was well-fed, Britain did not prioritize same in its colonies, and actively contributed to the catastrophic 1943 famine in Bengal.
Boyle, Eleanor. Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today. Victoria, B.C.: FriesenPress, 2022. mobilizefood.org
Jaine, Tom. “Marguerite Patten obituary.” The Guardian, June 10, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/10/marguerite-patten
Hyslop, Leah. “Eight Things Marguerite Patten Taught Us.” The Telegraph, June 10, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/11665071/Eight-things-Marguerite-Patten-taught-us.html
Moseley, Rachel. “Marguerite Patten, Television Cookery and Postwar British Femininity.” In Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture (Gillis, Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows [eds]). New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008.
Ibid.
Levy, Paul. “Not all TV cooks have the right ingredients.” The Telegraph, June 11, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/11668026/Not-all-TV-cooks-have-the-right-ingredients.html
“Marguerite Patten, Food Writer—Obituary.” The Telegraph, June 10, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11665211/Marguerite-Patten-food-writer-obituary.html