The kitchen is the heart of domesticity; the home of the home where food and warmth are enjoyed by family members. But even the kitchen—this private realm in our life—can be part of everyday politics. Here, Liza Hadiz considers the role of the kitchen in the Cold War, including the famous ‘kitchen debate’.
US Vice-President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev taking part in the ‘kitchen debate’ at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959.
The Chamber
Before modern technologies were developed for the household, the kitchen was the drudgery of domestic labor; labor which was generally associated with women’s role. Not surprisingly, the Soviets once viewed the kitchen as a terrible chamber for women. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the kitchen was part of the house that must be rid of for the full emancipation of women. Public dining spaces replaced the kitchen to free women from the derogatory labor and toil of the kitchen, to give women time for self-growth and development—more time to read as well as explore literature and the arts.
When these public dining places didn’t take off too well and the growing industry brought more people to the cities, the government set up communal apartments for several families to live in. Called kommunalka, these living spaces had a shared kitchen. The kitchens in these homes were public space, where each family sharing the apartment cooked their meals in.
Among the pots and pans and laundry of all the families living in the apartment, the kitchen was not the best place to be sitting down to enjoy your coffee. Not just because it was a potential hotbed for occupants to engage in conflict, perhaps over a missing kettle, but it was also a dangerous place to carry out the wrong conversation. In the communal kitchen, you would have to watch what you say, as information can be passed on to the government.
A Kitchen of One’s Own
From the 1950s, in the rush to provide housing for the increasing population, low ceiling two-bedroom apartments were developed for the masses—dubbed the Khrushchyovka, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. This time, they were built for individual families, with their very own bathroom and kitchen too. As extended families of three generations cramped into these small apartments, there was barely space for family members to eat together. But at least they had their very own kitchen.
With families having their own privacy, the kitchen did not become any safer. Being a private space, the government needed to take an even closer look at the kitchen. Agents were watching and tapping kitchens.
However threatening, families welcomed guests into their small kitchens, and they were the place where conversations about politics and the arts took place. Between the walls of the kitchen, underground self-published literature (samizdat) was shared and read. It was also a place for family and friends to listen to banned music, such as jazz and rock and roll. When a group of people hung out in the kitchen like this, it was considered a form of dissident activity.
Ironically, while freedom of art and freedom of expression were topics discussed at the kitchen table, the discrimination that Soviet women were facing was left out of the discussion.
While after the revolution, Russian women obtained legal, political, and economic rights, it was not long after Stalin came into power that he brought back the traditional gender division of labor. Women were defined as mother, wife, and communist. Women’s condition eroded. Between the neighboring walls of communal apartments, it was no secret that women were victims of abuse.
In 1979, a group of women (Tatiana Mamonova, Tatiana Goricheva, Natalia Malakhovskaya, and Yuliya Vesnesenskaya) self-published the controversial almanac Woman and Russia that revealed what women really faced in the Soviet Union: the double standard as proletariats and as wives and mothers, unequal pay, domestic violence, poor conditions of maternity clinics, and the state’s poor childcare quality. However, the dissident circles did not care to discuss these issues at their kitchen tables and it was not long after the almanac’s circulation that the KGB were after the authors, forcing them to flee the Soviet Union.
The Dishwasher
Twenty years before Woman and Russia was written, in 1959, during an American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had a heated debate with US Vice President Richard Nixon about women and kitchen design—one which would be remembered years on as part of Cold War history. Nixon proudly introduced the kitchen model of the “typical American house” and then particularly took the dishwasher as an example which he might have thought would represent women’s liberation in the US.
While pointing at a dishwasher Nixon goes on to say:
“This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.”
In response, Khrushchev said, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism.”
Nixon replied, “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life easier for our housewives.”[i]
The dishwasher conversation between the two leaders—dubbed “the kitchen debate”—is quite telling. Women’s wellbeing was some sort of a benchmark for assessing a political system.
So if the Soviet Union had wanted to liberate women by getting rid of the kitchen, the US had opted for revolutionizing the kitchen. After World War II, women in America were encouraged to stay at home to make way for the employment of men returning from war. During this time, the old-fashioned American kitchen began experiencing a dramatic change. Listening to what housewives felt about their kitchen, in the late 1940s, architects, engineers, and home economics specialists began building modern kitchens. Using new technology, kitchens were turned into workshops to make cooking and washing convenient, less time consuming, and to give women freedom from drudgery. The architect of the successful suburban houses of the 1950s, Alfred Levitt, was quoted as saying: “Thanks to the number of appliances in our house, the girls will have three hours to kill every afternoon.”[ii]
With the new technologies aimed to boost efficiency and reduce domestic labor time, especially for women, couples could operate independently of extended family members. This was the time of the rise of the postwar nuclear family with the male breadwinner/housewife gender roles, from what advertisers and women’s magazines created the image of the postwar middle-class housewife.
Although as a housewife a woman toils with unpaid labor daily, in the capitalist system Nixon was promoting, this was not considered demeaning. Her devotion to her family was what makes up the American family values of the time. US Cold War propaganda heavily focused on the family where the values of the ideal Western family were expected to sell democracy and capitalism abroad through the image of prosperity that the ideal family suggested.
Beyond the Kitchen
Interestingly, just four years after the kitchen talk with the Soviet leader—where Nixon attempted to use the domestic sphere to indicate the improvement of women’s life in the US—Betty Friedan’s research revealed the contrary. Her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) exposed what was not communicated over the kitchen table: the unhappy white middle-class housewife’s discontent with domestic life.
Likewise, in contrast to what Khrushchev may have thought about communism’s attitude towards women, Soviet women faced discrimination in the private and public sphere and this fact was even overlooked by dissident circles. Banned over 40 years ago, the self-published Woman and Russia was in last year’s Leningrad Feminism 1979 exhibition. The exhibition allowed us to hear the once silenced voices of women who criticized the Soviet Union. These were the voices denied at the kitchen table.
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Liza Hadiz is an editor and writer who lives in Jakarta. She writes on topics related to gender and history. Her blog is Some Thoughts from the Cappuccino Girl https://feministpassion.blogspot.com.
[i] Taken from The Kitchen Debate-transcript 24 July 959 Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev U.S. Embassy, Moscow, Soviet Union.
[ii] Levittown Pa. (2003) Building the Suburban Dream.
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