Eighteenth-Century Women's Cookbooks: Authors And
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S COOKBOOKS: AUTHORS AND COPYRIGHT A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, SPEECH, AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY RANAE UNDERWOOD B.A. DENTON, TEXAS AUGUST 2017 ABSTRACT RANAE UNDERWOOD EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S COOKBOOKS: AUTHORS AND COPYRIGHT AUGUST 2017 Women-authored cookbooks from the eighteenth century exemplify the economic ethos of the time: commodification of knowledge and ownership of intellectual property. Despite this, little research has been done on early copyright law and cookbooks. This thesis examines the increase in value of women’s knowledge by, first, establishing an enumerated bibliography of women-authored cookbooks first published between 1745 and 1800, and, second, analyzing the title pages of the texts. Due to the subject of this thesis, this thesis is interdisciplinary, with a grounding in bibliography and feminist rhetorical studies. An analysis of the data reveals that texts published outside of London were more likely to have authors retain the copyright for the first edition than texts published in London, suggesting that community practices impacted what rights women had to property while living under coverture. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ iv Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 II. METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................. 13 Selection of Texts ........................................................................................... 14 Book History Practices ................................................................................... 16 Feminist Rhetorical Practices ......................................................................... 20 III. WOMEN IN CONTEXT ................................................................................... 24 Expansion of Women’s Roles within the Economy ....................................... 26 Women and Property ...................................................................................... 31 Text as Property .............................................................................................. 35 IV. FINDINGS ......................................................................................................... 47 The Author on the Page .................................................................................. 48 The Author’s Identity ...................................................................................... 52 Location .......................................................................................................... 57 Copyright Ownership ...................................................................................... 60 V. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 68 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 71 APPENDIX List of Women Authored Cookbooks 1745-1800 ...................................................... 80 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Raffald (1733-1781), an English author during the latter part of the eighteenth century, achieved widespread popularity by publishing a book about managing and working in the kitchen of a noble household. She capitalized on her expertise in domestic work to build an empire comprised of a servant registry office, confectionary shop, catering service, and a newspaper.1 Alluding to her empire on the title page of her first cookery book, The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), she calls attention to her experience, credentials, and knowledge. She assures the reader that her book comes out of her service to a lady of noble rank, that she “wrote [it] purely from practice,” and that the book contains, as the title page notes, “near 800 original receipts, most of which never appeared in print.”2 Looking at these statements it appears that Raffald felt a firm ownership over the information in her book. The recipes stemmed from her years in service, and now, with the publication of her book, she was sharing with readers the knowledge that had led to her success. In order to further assure her readers of the authenticity of her book, Raffald signed every copy of the first edition.3 Elizabeth Raffald serves as an example of how women used the written word as a way to take part in their 1 Eric Quayle, Old Cookbooks: An Illustrated History (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 102-03. 2 Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester, UK: J. Harrop, 1769). 3 Quayle, Old Cookbooks, 103-4. 1 society and economy like female novelists, poets, and playwrights. There is little doubt that she was an extraordinary businesswoman. Raffald possessed a shrewd understanding of retail, established a personal brand, protected her intellectual property, and built a successful publishing venture based on her personal authority and command of the subject. Furthermore, she is noteworthy for selling her copyright of The Experienced English House-keeper in 1773 for £1,400, a copyright under her name—not her husband’s.4 In fact, Raffald’s sale places her copyright among the most valuable copyrights sold during the eighteenth century.5 When considering the legal and cultural restraints on women during this time, her achievements become extraordinary. Women of the upper and noble classes were seen to have four duties: obey their husbands, produce heirs, run the household, and be ladylike.6 In addition to these social expectations, laws also forced women to be dependent upon men by stripping them of their names and property upon marriage. Married women like Raffald lived under the practice of coverture, the common law that essentially combined the husband and wife into one legal entity, that of the husband’s.7 But coverture was not the only to cover women and property, and the development of copyright law during the eighteenth century gave 4 Ibid., 100-03. 5 David Fielding and Shef Rogers, "Copyright Payments in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1701–1800," The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 18, no. 1 (2017): 16. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed June 22, 2017). 6 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 24. 7 Ibid. 2 authors rights over their texts. The written word, and especially the published word, allowed women to participate in the society and economy of England. Unfortunately, the push in recent decades to reclaim women’s writing has largely ignored authors like Raffald. Reclamation of female authorship has primarily focused on women who produced traditional modes of literature, whether in the form of drama, prose, poetry, letters, pamphlets, or diaries, yet the works of women who wrote technical literature, literature that instructs on a particular subject, should also be recognized by scholars of the eighteenth century for normalizing the concept of women as writers and authors. As women began to innovate the cookbook genre, their readership grew. Women readers supported these women authors, leading to more opportunities for women to publish. Women became successful in writing during the eighteenth century, in part by reinforcing their authority in the domestic realm. And for household and domestic women workers, their class standing and experience may have benefited them when deciding to publish their works. For women authors of this time, as Cheryl Turner notes in her examination of the subject, there were “two key features of their authorship: its function as a source of income for impecunious, literate women without apparently posing a threat to their respectability; and the ascendancy of the middle class amongst literary women.”8 The acceptance of women as authoritative cookbook authors, as I claim in this thesis, is a direct result of the growing readership of women. If we acknowledge 8 Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 3 the importance of understanding the growth of female readership during the eighteenth century,9 then we also must address and recognize the women on the other side of the text, even if it is not traditional literature. That is, to understand fully the growth of female readership and writing, we must examine all aspects of it. Although she is an exceptional example of a successful woman writer during this time, Raffald was not the only woman to build a name for herself through cookery books. The growth of women publishing cookery books during the eighteenth century deserves to be researched. Questions regarding what publication of cookery books offered women informs my research. Did writing cookery books allow women a way to subvert the laws and customs? How did female authors of cookery books in eighteenth century England use published domestic writing intended for use in the home to establish a personhood that was legally denied to them? By answering these questions, I hope to demonstrate that although writing about subjects that further delegated women to the home, by engaging in the very male-dominated