Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 17

Forever Lunching

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differs here is the fact that this writer fears the WI could ultimately change male
and female roles:
That my wife is busy there is no dispute,
For she is a member of the Institute.
I eat my mush raw and I drink cold tea
For my wife is a busy as she can be.
She is writing a paper on canning fruit,
Which she will read at the Institute.
Now I make my own bed and sweep up the floor.
And clean all the rubish from the door....
When women get votes as I’ve no doubt they will.
The first thing they’ll do is to pass a new bill
For to make it both lawful and just to shoot
Or to herd all old men in some Institute.
You need not expect me at home for tea
Was the parting salute my wife gave me
We are having a lady of some repute
To lecture today at the Institute.
This poet/husband was concerned that women’s preoccupation with food at WI
was simply a front for more profound social reorganisation that would assign
political power to women while men would be relegated to housework and meal
preparation.
Though the pre-suffrage poet’s fears about new models for the gendered
division of labour in the home were never fully realised even after women did
receive the right to vote, there is significance to the association between women’s
meetings, food and power. For large numbers of women, access to educational
opportunities (even domestic science education) was an important first step in the
process of empowerment. For some, this was their first occasion to move in a
circle outside their own homes, and the only possible way to pursue continuing
education. Regardless of their previous level of education, women found that these
courses granted them access to formal instruction. That alone was significant. For
others, expertise in domestic science was a step toward liberation. At a very personal
level, this meant that some women strategized about how to become more efficient
so that they could have more leisure time. For others, leaving their homes to study
food together represented a shift in the gendered division of labour while husbands
learned to fend for themselves in the kitchen. Over the long term, that shift was
never fully realised of course, but just as men could learn to cook, this anti-suffrage
poem suggests that women would learn to vote and to use that political power to