what’s cooking?
There are many aspects of modern life that have become a mess of mixed signals, stuck in a time warp between traditional values and those of the supposedly modern.
Apparently, feminism really stuffed us up.
My generation of women has grown up expecting to work and earn an equal wage to men, but her man must still pay for a date. We don’t want anyone holding our arm as if we were wilting flowers, but expect to have car doors opened for us.
More and more, I have realised that while my parents’ generation were radical rule-breakers, my friends are much more conservative. We tend to do things the old-fashioned way, even if our mums didn’t. Never has this been more true to me than over the past month.
Everyone I know seems to be getting married. That means engagement parties, hen’s nights and bridesmaid shopping. It also means potato peeling, apron tying, egg separating and recipe reading. It means spending Sunday afternoons nibbling cupcakes with three generations of women. It means kitchen teas.
I think it’s great that women rally around a bride-to-be and spend time with her before her Big Day. Noone’s going to deny that marriage is one of the big changes that we go through in life. But why is it that women today, who expect their partners to do their fair share of the cooking, cleaning and washing up, persist with the ‘she-who-grates-the-carrot-fastest-shall-be-awarded-with-a-set-of-spatulas’ philosophy?
The irony of Gen Y adopting the kitchen tea is that, while sticking to an age-old tradition, they have magnified it by modern proportions. While kitchen tea gifts in my mum’s generation were mops, buckets and toilet paper, brides today set a bridal registry of expensive household items for both the wedding and kitchen tea.
It is possible people still have kitchen teas for the same reason they have baby showers. That is, they’ve got a Big Financial Blowout coming up and need all the help they can get.
I’m really enjoying all the kitchen teas I’ve had lately. While my vegetable mashing prowess is not yet fully developed and it irks me that there is still an assumption that women should, by nature, be domesticated, being in the same room as several generations of women is really uplifting. I wonder whether we’ll ever let go of such conflicting traditions or whether it will be our daughters or granddaughters who start to break the mould …
photo / cx_ed / stock.xchang
