Food, Empowerment, and Iowa: Exploring Mrs. Welch's Cookbook

If people know anything about Iowa, it's corn. But in this same realm of food and farming that defines the state in popular conception, there is a lesser known history of Iowa's quiet progressivism and forcible women promoting their own brand of feminism in the late nineteenth century. Led by Mary B. Welch, first head of Iowa Agricultural College's Department of Domestic Economy, Iowa women shifted the conception of household duties and found power in food and domestic science, leading to the formation of real and imagined groups where women asserted their significant influence on the moral and physical strength of families and communities. Using a folklorific lens to examine Welch's 1884 text Mrs. Welch's Cookbook, supplemented with Welch's personal papers and early Department of Domestic Economy records as well as secondary sources spanning folklore, foodways, and women's history texts, this paper explores an oft-overlooked population to understand ways in which Iowa women acted out an ideal household narrative while embracing domestic economy as a science to push social values and empower themselves and each other to claim their value in a rural society.