Abstract: | The progress of any society, be it modern or traditional, entails and depends on mentalities, derived from stereotypes and prejudices formed over time and transmitted from one generation to another. Of these, the most commonly used are those about the role and place of women and men in society. For Romanians, the nineteenth century was a century of "lights" because, beyond their liberation from foreign rule (Phanariot, then Ottoman), it was the time when an extensive process of "enlightenment" of the people began, including the gastronomic field.
Supported by the theoretical framework on gender provided by Kelly, Bayes et al. (2004) and Gordon (1993), our paper aims at illustrating the factors that contributed to the resistance of traditional perceptions on the gender-based division of domestic labour. The survey conducted in this study highlights the major changes that have taken place in Romanian society, from the 19th century to the present, in order to account for the evolution of the housewife to the lady chef or chef. The sociolinguistic perspective will be based on a corpus of texts, namely prefaces of some cookbooks as "useful books" for Romanian domestic economy, published in the 19th and 20th centuries, and on information extracted from online and contemporary media, to the purpose of highlighting the major changes that have taken place in Romanian society, from the housewife to the lady chef or chef. |
