Mapping Women's Networks: Insights from Recipes and Historical GIS

Cookbooks provide a lens for reevaluating the nature of women’s experience during the nineteenth century. The decades between 1830 and 1860 witnessed a transformation in the definition of women’s role and the communication of those expectations. Geographic mobility and advancements in printing altered the process of domestic instruction. Rather than learning domestic management from female relatives, women increasingly turned to newspapers, printed cookbooks, and their peer groups. This paper uses GIS mapping techniques to shift the conceptual focus of women’s experiences from time to space. Manuscript recipe collections provide a sense not only of what women were cooking, but also their friendship networks. These unique sources, with their careful attention to recipe origins, allow the text to become a map. When viewed spatially using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) previously obscured relationships are revealed. Spanning both the nineteenth century and the northeastern United States, when viewed spatially these recipe collections allow women’s networks to be viewed and experienced. They emphasize the importance of female friendships and the maintenance of these relationships into adult life and the authority women exerted within the domestic space.