Throughout history, women have used food and cookbooks not just to nourish, but to resist, reclaim, and redefine their place in the world. Across time and geography, cookbooks have been more than collections of recipes; they have served as acts of defiance, tools of empowerment, and records of resilience in the face of oppression. This Women’s History Month, let’s honor the women who have wielded recipes as acts of defiance, cultural survival, and political activism. Here are just a few of many, many examples!
Enslaved & Oppressed Women Preserving Culture
Malinda Russell, a free Black woman, published A Domestic Cook Book in 1866, challenging racist stereotypes and asserting culinary expertise at a time when Black women were denied authorship.
Indigenous women have fought against forced assimilation by reclaiming traditional foodways, emphasizing sustainability, and highlighting native ingredients and food preparation. Corn Dance by Loretta Barrett Oden, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest by Heid E. Erdrich, and The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley are just a few examples of cookbooks that resist erasure and celebrate Indigenous culinary history.
Women Using Food as Wartime Resistance
In ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust, Jewish women secretly wrote down recipes from memory, holding onto their culture even while facing starvation. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin stands as a testament to their resilience.
During the early 20th century, women across Europe created cookbooks that doubled as survival guides, sharing creative ways to make nourishing meals despite rationing and food shortages. Examples include We’ll Eat Again by Marguerite Patten and El hambre en el Madrid de la Guerra Civil by Laura and Carmen Gutiérrez Rueda.
Feminist Cookbooks & Domestic Rebellion
The Suffrage Cookbook (1915) and others connected food to activism, fundraising for the suffrage movement while proving that women could balance political engagement with everyday life.
In the 1970s, feminist collectives like Bloodroot Collective published cookbooks like The Political Palate that challenged patriarchal kitchen norms, advocating for plant-based and communal food systems.
Immigrant & Diaspora Women Preserving Identity
Jewish women in exile documented global Jewish food traditions in cookbooks like The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden, preserving their heritage despite displacement.
Palestinian women, amid occupation and displacement, have shared their histories through books like The Gaza Kitchen by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, ensuring that their cultural identity remains strong.
MiMi Aye, a Burmese-British writer, documents the home cooking of the Burmese diaspora, making traditional dishes accessible to those outside Burma.Â
Community CookbooksÂ
Women’s church groups, feminist collectives, and activists have long created community cookbooks to fundraise and/or strategize for causes like civil rights, food equity, reproductive justice, and disaster relief. Check out Feed the Resistance: Recipes + Ideas for Getting Involved by Julia Turshen and over 20 contributors.Â
Prison cookbooks written by incarcerated women like Stinging for Their Suppers: How Women in Prison Nourish Their Bodies & Souls shed light on resilience in oppressive conditions, documenting how they sustain themselves and each other with limited resources.