Butter Woman, Farmer’s Wife and Housewife of the Year: tracing women in Ireland’s domestic food history

Bourke’s (1990) analysis of agricultural reports (1894-1927) charted the transformation in women’s fortunes from waged ‘butterwomen’ to unpaid farm wives, setting the scene for housewifery as the primary female occupation for generations of Irish women from the foundation of the State.
While nowadays the position of women in Irish society is the subject of two constitutional referenda, for much of the 20th century, Ireland had a gender regime where the cultural ideal of the wife, mother and homemaker as a woman’s ‘real job,’ was deeply embedded. It was embodied in the annual Housewife of the Year competition which ran from 1967 to1995 and is the subject of my research project. Cookery was an integral part of the contest as food production and preparation were valued female skills.
Around that time some women began to see the commercial potential of home cooking. Perhaps the best example is Myrtle Allen, founder of Ballymaloe, who successfully commercialized the work of ‘farmers’ wives’ through her restaurant and cookery school. Myrtle’s recipes were first published in the Irish Farmer’s Journal as ‘a column for other farmers’ wives’ (Allen, 2015: 144).
The paper concludes that critically examining food preparation as ‘women’s work’ is a useful way in to preserve elements of food culture which may be lost as food production and consumption moves outside the home.