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Frigga Haug
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Jacob Blumenfeld
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A: ṭabaḵa. – F: cuisinière. – G: Köchin. – R: kucharka. – S: cocinera. – C: nǚ chúshī 女厨师

The dictum attributed to Lenin, that the woman C should govern the state, strikes an emancipatory path for women and at the same time points towards a socialist-democratic politics as a learning project. The phrase was often adopted, interpreted, even brought into poetry, and finally metaphorically used as a book title – Kitchen and State – encouraging women to politically intervene with the aim of ‘transforming social relations in such a way that all domains can be governed by all without domination and therefore collectively’ (Haug/Hauser 1988, 7). In order to historically and critically situate this dictum and its reception between state-, emancipatory-, and revolutionary politics, a digression into the social and cultural history of the (female) C is necessary.

Terminology and sources. – In the usual reference works, including the Catholic Social Lexicon (1980) and the Evangelical State Lexicon (1987), the term “C” does not exist; even feminist manuals have no such entry. For instance Bonnie Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser (1988) discuss neither Cs nor kitchens nor cooking. Astonishingly, even in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983) by Barbara Walker, cooking appears as little as the kitchen, and the C not at all, although there is an entry on ‘kingship’. Annette Kuhn (1992) lists cooking and the kitchen in the index of her Chronicle of Women, but no woman Cs. However, she does deal with the cooking activities of women, among other things. She attributes to women the fact that ‘they developed the art of cooking’ (32) and heat-resistant vessels and invented ‘the steam pressure pot’ (56) in China as early as 2000 BC. – Barbara Olsson examines the literary representation of the kitchen as ‘the woman’s own space (and a foreign space for men)’, which secures ‘female cultural identity as a food giver and housewife’ (2001, 134) and for that very reason must inevitably be abandoned (144). Due to this way of looking at the problem, both the male C in his kitchen and the specificity of the woman C escapes her. – In the five-volume History of Women in the West by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, there are essentially blank spaces where cooking takes place. The first three volumes, which go up to the early modern period, have no entry at all for the entire field. In the fourth volume (19th cent.), under the question of how women’s work can be portrayed, it simply says: ‘Manifestly working-class women tended to be represented in the kitchen, engaged in the reassuringly domestic tasks of sewing or cooking’. (1993, 314) In the fifth volume (20th cent.), cooking can be found in the index, but not woman C or kitchen. As the conclusion to a chapter on the development of home technology, it is written: ‘In the kitchen and in Cooking, both traditionally women’s domain, contradictory effects appear’ (1994, 103). For example, women would save time by no longer baking bread and by using canned goods; the husband would go to the canteen and people would no longer eat two hot meals a day. The interest concerns only the budgeting of time. – Even the five-volume History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, includes no woman C, although it offers lots of material on the development of the kitchen as a social space. – Advanced architecture attends to the rational design of the kitchen. The kitchen becomes a paradigm for needs-oriented construction by leftist architects. Influential was the ‘Frankfurt kitchen’ (1930) by Margarete Schütte-Lihozky. – Jürgen Kuczynski, who wrote the History of Everyday Life of the German People (1980 et sqq.) (without a subject index), should be aware of the woman C, with his view from below. But, until after the Thirty Years’ War, he sees only misery and poverty. Then, concrete labour comes into view: ‘Preparing meals’ (vol. 1, 226), ‘baking, preparing beer and mead’, ‘the housewife cooks while she does other things like spinning’ (232). In the volume on the 19th cent., Kuczynski comes to the kitchen: ‘It is unnecessary to describe in detail these different hand tools [crockery, spoons, baking trays], since they are neither significant for our period, nor useful for sustaining socio-economic relations’ (349). Kuczynski’s view of ways of life explores eating habits, the nutritional situation and above all the time budget, namely, that not much time could be spent on cooking for the lower classes (280 et sqq.). ‘Cook faster, eat faster, that’s the device’ (292). He is not interested in the development of female forms of individuality such as the woman C.

In Grimm’s dictionary, finally, it says that the woman C appears in the 15th cent. as a ‘cook-maid’, ‘parson-cook’, and in addition: ‘even better to have a cookess than a wife’ (vol. 11, 1562). – Whenever there is talk of a woman C, it is self-evidently discussed from a class standpoint: one is not a C, one has a C, just like one has other servants. Bourgeois disesteem is mixed with respect: kitchen fairy, pearl or jewel. Moreover, the kitchen is also a metaphor for inferior things, as can be traced in the expression ‘kitchen Latin’ or in Ludwig Büchner’s discourse on the ‘philosophical kitchen’, where ‘modern philosophers rehash cold meat with new phrases, and dishing it up as the last invention’ (1855/2011, 194). – Since dietary awareness and naturopathy have become increasingly popular of late, some people are also looking back on the medieval abbess and naturopath Hildegard von Bingen with the claim that she was a woman C. In truth, she wrote books on nutrition – about spelt, among other topics. – In the Brockhaus encyclopaedia, one finds cooking as a ‘preparation of food products’ and the art of cooking ‘as the harmonious composition of food’ and a C as a ‘recognized occupation for men and women’ (1993, 173). However, according to the German Federal Employment Agency, this profession has only been recognised since 1940. Cooking first received training regulations in West Germany in 1979; in East Germany, cooking was included in vocational training documents as early as 1963 and again in 1975 as ‘skilled work’ (Council of Ministers). In 1998, this occupation was expanded to include the qualifications of ‘guest-oriented service’. Public catering is the occupational field.

2. Cultural- and socio-historical moments. In his 1602 utopia, The City of the Sun, Campanella designs a society in which ‘no one considers it disgraceful to wait at tables or to serve in the kitchen or to nurse the sick etc. but they call every task a service. Whatever work with the body they call quite honourable’ (63). Reconstructing a social history of the woman C involves the double difficulty of tracking an activity (of serving) in its development which was long considered to be minor, and of writing this on women whose overall position is additionally subjugated, and for whom the historical sources are completely insufficient. Sometimes a woman C is mentioned to indicate a low status and to warn against transgressing the class barriers. For example, in the sixteenth century, Paracelsus criticized a man who ‘adorns his wife with golden chains – she who may have been a peasant, a woman cook, a maid, a servant girl, even a whore – treating her like a duchess’ (Das Buch Paragranum, 261) – Easier to find is the history of the C and cooking as an art. In the Middle Ages, the kitchens were ‘almost a purely male world. There were certainly woman cooks, but not in the service of the aristocracy. In miniatures, women are depicted who cook for bourgeois families. Woman cooks are also mentioned in Spanish communities, such as Na Gordana, who with two servants in 1338 prepared the food for the poor for a pious foundation in Lerida’ (Laurioux 1999, 100; cf. Brodman 1998, chapter 2). In the 16th cent., the physician Agrippa von Nettesheim reflected on the fact that the C in ancient Rome was at first a disregarded slave, but then had risen at the same degree as ‘superfluous feasts […] were introduced. And that which before was accounted but a vile Slavery, was estimated a felicitous art: whose care and concern is only to search out everywhere for stimulations of the throat […]. The glory and fame of this art Apicius above all others claim’d to himself; (as Septimus Florus witnesses), cooks were call’d Apicians, as if they were a philosophical school; of which thus Seneca reports in his writing’ (The Art of Cookery, 307 et sq.). – ‘In the 17th cent., a new “art” of eating developed in France, which called itself “gastronomy or gastrosophy” […]. Great sirs of high rank now excelled as cooks. […] A great marshal knew as much about cooking as about warfare’, and the most famous cook supposedly hurled himself into his sword when the roast did not suffice (Teuteberg/Wiegelmann 1972, 37–40, cited by Kuczynski 1981, vol. 2, 290). The line of great Cs continues into the 21st cent. A capable C is a man, and his art can be enjoyed by the upper class, first at court by the nobility, and later by the bourgeoisie. While the development of the culinary art and its enjoyment can be traced as a class question and as occupied by men, women as woman Cs count only as unqualified maids and belonging to property. Cooking is a vital practice, but with regard to the common people, not transmittable. In the 18th cent., it was the ‘social consensus that the preparation of food belongs to the typical female obligations – however only in the private domain […]. Despite this, little effort had been made to qualify women in food preparation […]. The daughters were considered unpaid household servants to their mother, who instructed them how to later take care of their husband, family, or their masteries as a maidservant’ (Titz-Matuszak 1994, 187). Struggles for paid work between female and male Cs are confirmed from the German city of Goslar, with the latter being regarded as ‘trained’, and the former wanting to cook cheaper for the poor out of their own sheer need; the magistrate decided in 1714 that a festivity with ‘more than four courses’ could only be arranged by male Cs, woman Cs however were allowed to cook for more modest festivities. They were obliged to report to the male Cs (189).

The women of the emerging bourgeoisie cook for themselves; as soon as they can afford it, a woman C is added to the rest of the servants. This way cooking does not become an art, but a subaltern and inferior activity like other houseworks. – In 1806, Carl-Friedrich von Rumohr ties the woman C’s bad reputation to the lack of ‘all profoundness of education’: ‘Secretly, today, they run their business with displeasure […]. Deception in purchasing sadly is daily fare since housewives have become too lazy, too ignorant, too sentimental to stock up; since then, every day of the year, there have been expenses in which the woman cooks rarely forget themselves’ (Bluth 1979, 61). – Julie Kaden recalls for the beginning of the 20th cent.: ‘If a girl helps with the daily work in her mother’s economy, she will quickly master the ABC of the art of cooking without ever having learned it. But when you are 17 years old, in a large kitchen where all kinds of willing hands are active, you are placed as an “au pair” next to a perfect woman cook – not to help her, because that’s not necessary, but to learn how to cook from her – so you stand around somewhat helpless and unhappy there. […] You must not touch it yourself, because the cook cannot risk burning the roast or spoiling the dessert with its many good ingredients. The “housekeeper” [Mamsell] is not engaged as a teacher, but as a cook and has no desire to reveal her secrets’ (1992, 71). Learning the labour of a C was thus made difficult by a multiple blockage: a strictly hierarchical division of labour in the kitchen, informality and a kind of guild secret.

In the history of literature and philosophy, the figure of the woman C wavers. She moves in an overdeterminated contradiction, in which the emerging bourgeosie mixes contempt for “lower services”, the gradual development of taste, custom, temperance, the misery of the lower classes and overwork, and the women question. – Rousseau links the division of labour that produced cooking as inferior female work with the particular essence of the bourgeois woman: ‘For example, although she is a gourmet, she does not take pleasure in kitchen-business. The necessary gross works are disgusting for her; no kitchen work is clean enough for her. In this regard she has an extreme delicacy, which […] has literally developed the character of a failing. She would rather let the whole meal spill into the fire than get a spot on her cuff’ (Emile 1979, 394 et sq.). – As soon as there is an extra person in the bourgeois family for cooking, the pleasure can also be related to the sexual. With Goethe, the woman C often appears mostly as a “Weib”, a female that one can have, that visits one at night, an accessory that is full of relish, like the food she prepares, and whose use can be economically advantageous at the same time. This is what the Anniversary Song (1801) says: ‘My cousin is a prudent wight / The cook’s by him ador’d / He turns the spit round ceaselessly / To gain love’s sweet reward’. To the hero of Wilhem Meister’s Travels, he ascribes the habit ‘on entering any inn, to look round for the landlady or even the cook, and wheedle myself into favor with her; whereby, for most part, my bill was somewhat reduced’ (1842, 403). In his Apprenticeship, Goethe lets a landlord think about the many jobs of the woman C and the winegrower and the ‘carelessness’ with which their products are ‘gulped down’ (2016, 563). From the lord’s point of view, the woman C is one of the prerequisites for a pleasurable life. – In Theodor Storm’s poem Of Cats, the woman C stands for good sense in the conflict between an affected ‘humanity’ and fertile nature, because she wants to drown the newborn cats: ‘But the woman cook – woman cooks are cruel / and humanity does not grow in a kitchen’ (cited in Matt 2009, 103). No less ironically does Kierkegaard speak from the soul of the philistine bourgeoisie: ‘So he marries. The neighbourhood claps its hands, considers that he has acted wisely and sensibly, and after that he joins in talking about the most important aspect of home management, the greatest earthly good: a good-natured and reliable woman cook one can allow to go to the market on her own, a handy maid who is so clever that she can be used for everything’ (Either Or, Part II, 77, transl. corr.). – Nietzsche combines contempt for women with a high regard for cooking. He blames the poor quality of domestic cooking – turning a blind eye to social conditions and class questions – on the alleged stupidity of the female sex. Like an inversion of Lenin’s woman C-dictum, he writes: ‘But whoever wants to share in the eating must also lend a hand, even the kings. In Zarathustra’s home, even a king may be a cook’ (Zarathustra, 2006, 231). He then turns to women: ‘Stupidity in the kitchen: woman as cook: the horrifying thoughtlessness that accompanies the feeding of the family and the master of the house! Woman does not understand what food means: and yet she wants to be the cook! If woman were a thinking creature, then as cook for thousands of years she would have had to discover the greatest physiological facts, as well as gain possession of the art of healing! Because of bad woman cooks […] the development of human beings has been delayed longest and impaired most’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 2014, 138 et sq., transl. corr.).

Without himself being free of contempt for the woman C, Adorno detects self-hatred in Nietzsche’s Kant-critique: ‘The path is not far from the Königsberg woman cook to the Polish aristocracy, from whose blood Nietzsche loved to derive himself. But also to ressentiment. It could happen to even the freest spirit that he becomes weary of his own origin if the possibility arises that the best, most genuine of his own nature – the noble has needed the mediation of a small bourgeois soul and poor cookess. So what if the hatred of Kant meant nothing other than the hatred against the cookess in himself? What if the dishonesty of the system, which the good European distrusts, turned out to be the dishonesty of the ancestress in the accounting book? If even, finally, the remotest possibility, that master morality itself were only a kind of higher slave morality, in which the servant Louise experiences her late, if questionable right over the categorical imperative of the oppressor?’ (GS 20.2, 555 et sq.) The woman C as denied origin, as the opposite pole of bourgeois education, becomes a kind of projection surface onto which the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in dealing with their own nature are inscribed. ‘Someone appalled by the good-breeding of his parents will seek refuge in the kitchen, basking in the cook’s expletives that secretly reflect the principle of the parental good breeding. The refined […] do not know that the indelicacy that appears to them as anarchic nature, is nothing but a reflex-action produced by the compulsion they struggle to resist’ (Minima Moralia, 2005, § 117, 183, transl. corr.).

3. Early Labour Movement. – The negative appraisal of the woman C’s work in the early labour movement draws on the miserable condition of the working class and the priority that the care for physical survival had under these conditions. Engels describes in detail the living conditions, especially the kitchens, which were mostly dark and contained, besides a stove, the dining and sleeping area: ‘one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds […] which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room’ (MECW 4/353 [MEW 2/283]). Marx quotes factory reports which speak of the overwork of the parents to the point of complete exhaustion and the handover of kitchen and household to the very young daughters: ‘The oldest girl who is 12, minds the house. She is also cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones ready for school. My wife gets up and goes along with me’ (35/700 [23/737]). Marx shows that capitalist relations prevent the possibility of cooking becoming a qualified practice of proletarian women by conversely demonstrating its paradoxical im/possibility as a result of the economic crisis in which working-class women now have the time ‘to learn to cook. Unfortunately, the acquisition of this art of cooking occurred at a time when they had nothing to eat. But from this we see how capital, for its own self-valorization, has usurped the family work necessary for consumption’ (398, fn. 1 [416 et sq., fn. 120], transl. corr.). – According to Engels, the ‘emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic work requires their attention only to a minor degree’; he expects this from the fact that ‘modern large-scale industry […] strives more and more to dissolve private domestic work into a public industry’ (26/262 [21/158]). This perspective leaves no room for a qualitative consideration of cooking and housework.

‘In the modern proletarian woman’, for Rosa Luxemburg as well, ‘the woman becomes a human being for the first time, because the struggle is what makes the human being, the share in the cultural work, in the history of humanity’. (RLR, 243 [GW 3, 411], transl. corr.) – In light of the increase in male unemployment and female factory work, August Bebel stigmatises terms that produce ill-considered side effects: ‘she-towns’ or ‘women’s cities’ were places of residence in which, according to a journal note he quotes, men as ‘ “housekeepers” […] attend to the household for the simple reason that their wives can earn more in the factory than they, and it means a saving of money if the women go to work’ (1878/1910, § 9.2, fn. 8, 128). The C does not appear, but the ‘cooking stove’ emerges as ‘the place where accounts are sadly balanced between income and expense, and where the most oppressing observations are made concerning the increased cost of living and the growing difficulty of raising the necessary funds’ (§ 10.3, 144, transl. corr.). Bebel is further interested in the development of productive forces in the household, especially in cooking and the industrialisation of products – ‘better, more practical and cheaper’ (§ 14.1, 235) – as an element of women’s liberation and the revolutionising of family life (§ 14.1). He collects examples of the cooperative kitchen and refers to the rich who eat at the hotel, where male chefs cook, as proof that the activity of cooking is not ‘a part of woman’s “natural sphere”. Indeed, the fact that royal and noble families and large hotels employ male cooks makes it appear as if cooking were man’s work. Let these facts be noted by those who cannot conceive woman except surrounded by pots and pans’ (§ 14.1, 236, transl. corr.). He pleads energetically for the liberation of the ‘private kitchen’ as a place of female activity, because it is ‘not merely troublesome and improper, but not even profitable to the purse, for the wife to bake bread and brew beer’ (ibid.). – In the tradition of the workers’ movement, the kitchen is not a place where pleasures are prepared, where life is sensuously shaped; the C is no giver of joy, but rather the ‘private kitchen’ is a metaphor for the insignificant and inferior, a place of stultification and enslavement. This is the context for the appearance of the slogan: the woman C should govern the state.

4. The sentence ‘the woman C should govern the state’ has become a well-known saying of Lenin’s even though it cannot be found in his written work. It sounds like a distant reply to Johann Gottfried Herder’s statement that ‘if cooks in Germany were to pose as heads of a learned republic’, this would be an evil (1797, Humanitätsbriefe, No. 113.3). In Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784), he writes about the Tatar imperial constitution: ‘The old fiction of state was converted into a naked truth: the whole empire was metamorphosed into the hall, the kitchen, and the stable of the king. […] Neither Greeks nor the Romans […] knew anything of such a fiction of state, which made the household of the regent the sum and substance of the kingdom’ (Outlines, vol. II., Book 18, chapter VI.4, 488 et sq.). Hegel too could be included as an antithesis: ‘When women are in charge of government, the state is in danger’ (PhRight, § 166A, 207).

4.1 The Russian word kucharka, used by Lenin and Bukharin, among others, does not refer to a professional C, but to a maid or kitchen maid as a cook. According to Trotsky (1937/1970, 98, 203 et sq., 280), when Lenin called Stalin a ‘cook who will prepare only spicy dishes’ in 1921, he used the word povar, whereas the feminine form would have been povaricha. The word kucharka belongs to the group of names used to describe the lowest and disenfranchised people, like in kucharkiny deti – the ‘children of the woman cook’; these are people without the “correct” background, without education, without culture. The expression can be found in a circular by the Minister of Education I.D. Delyanov, signed by Tsar Alexander III (1887), according to which only children from “good families” were allowed to be admitted to grammar schools, emphatically not children of ‘flunkeys, woman cooks, laundrywomen, peddlers, and similar people’ (cited in Aschukin/Aschukina 1987, 181).

According to N.S. Aschukin and M.G. Aschukina (1987, 153) the widespread slogan (which subsequently spread as Lenin’s woman C-phrase) is based on his 1917 article ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’ There it says: ‘We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a woman cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration. In this we agree with the Cadets, with Breshkovskaya, and with Tsereteli. We differ, however, from these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administering the state, of performing the ordinary, everyday work of administration. We demand that training in the work of state administration be conducted by class-conscious workers and soldiers and […] that a beginning be made at once in training all the working people, all the poor, for this work’ (CW 26/113). The woman C-phrase is first of all a statement not only about making politics, but a class statement about learning; it is part of a programme for the appropriation of relations through practice. In this context, Lenin speaks of the ‘apathy and indifference’ (184) that afflicts those who are excluded from the formation of society, a theme almost adopted word for word by Gramsci. Lenin sees the transformation of the lower classes into active members of society as a learning process of ‘original democracy’; it is possible ‘from the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands’, with the result ‘that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit’ (CW 25/479).

In 1919, Lenin deals with the transformation of certain domestic tasks into social labour as well as the economic and political role of women: ‘We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework. And the work of organising all these institutions will fall mainly to women’ (CW 30/44). The sentence pulls the statement in two directions. On the one hand, because of women’s experience in the domestic economy, they seem particularly suited for carrying out the transformation on a societal level, of expanding the state with facilities for managing life and raising children, so that the woman Cs themselves take over the socialisation of domestic work, ‘a job that will take us many, many years’ (43), because they know it from the ground up; on the other hand, in this context, the liberation of women is linked to the abolition of ‘household slavery’ (44) so that they can participate in ‘common productive labour’ (43).

Lenin combines the task with Marx’s slogan: ‘We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves. The working women must themselves see to it that such institutions are developed, and this activity will bring about a complete change in their position as compared with what it was under the old, capitalist society’ (44). Accordingly, the woman C will govern the state to the extent that she makes its previous tasks public. Correspondingly, Lenin never tires of demanding that the domestic economy – ‘the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do’ (43) – develops into a ‘communal economy’ and the transition from ‘small-scale economies to communal economy’ (CW 28/181) must be accomplished. This brings the woman C-statement into the centre of the socialist or communist perspective, which ‘demands a radical reconstruction both of social praxis and of conception’ (CW 30/409, transl. corr.). Lenin’s further remarks on women’s liberation bring the C-statement into the context of revolutionary theory, in which women are conceived of as subjects shaping society; their previous activities, however, insofar as they concern the kitchen and children, are depicted as ‘stupefying’, ‘humiliating’, and so on (409). Even the lowest wage labour is not labelled as such. Domestic women’s work, in Lenin’s characterisation, seems to belong to a more primitive social formation. ‘Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins’ (CW 29/429). – In his speech on International Working Women’s Day in 1921, Lenin also emphasises the particularity of women’s involvement in the socialist project: ‘But you cannot draw the masses into politics without drawing in the women as well’ (CW 32/161). A year earlier on the same occasion, it was thus said that not only capitalist oppression but also legal oppression had to be eliminated, and especially – ‘this is the main task’ – “domestic slavery” (CW 30/409). Accordingly, the March 1919 Program of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) announces: ‘For centuries bourgeois democracy has been proclaiming the equality of humans, irrespective of sex, religion, race and nationality, but capitalism never allowed this equality to be realised in practice anywhere and during its imperialist stage brought about the most intense oppression of races and nationalities. Only because the Soviet government is the government of the toilers was it able for the first time in history to introduce this equality of rights completely and in all spheres of life, including the absolute elimination of the last traces of inequality of women in the sphere of marriage and general family rights. The task of the Party at the present moment is mainly to carry on intellectual and educational work for the purpose of finally stamping out all traces of the former inequality and prejudices, especially among the backward strata of the proletariat and the peasantry. Not satisfied with the formal equality of women, the Party strives to free women from the material burden of obsolete domestic economy, by replacing this with the house-communes, public dining-halls, central laundries, creches, etc’ (The 1919 Lenin Program, 117, transl. corr.).

4.2 Thus, Lenin’s assessment of the situation of women and the quality of kitchen-work gives a clear mandate to the sentence about the woman C who governs the state. He speaks of the emancipation of women and develops therein a grassroots democratic perspective. The lower classes must revolutionise the existing state and its division of labour. By doing so, they learn how to arrange it anew. Lenin therefore does not think that one can leap directly from the cooking pot into state affairs. – Although very general, Lenin’s statements on the transformation of the individual household into a communal economy with national kitchens and so on were initially based on the experience of domestic work, but subsequently in the learning of political power through the practice of its exercise, only the radical democratic impulse remains: everyone should participate in governing.

In the disputes over labour discipline and compromises with the old company owners and managers, Bukharin (from 1918), as a representative of the inner-Bolshevik left, initially pushed for a radical democratic approach to building socialism. Every time, he refers to the C-phrase, which had become a keyword for left-communists. In 1918, he criticised Lenin’s slogan of ‘taking a lesson in socialism from the trust managers’ (CW 42/77), because it is incompatible with building socialism from below. The abolition of the ‘socialist commune-state’ (gosudarstvom-kommunoj) in the direction of state capitalism contradicts Lenin’s ‘excellently formulated slogan of teaching every cookess to govern the state’ (Kommunist 3, 1918/1990, 150). Against the imminent bureaucratisation of Soviet power and production, Bukharin again takes up the woman C-phrase, this time with a critical sharpening: ‘It is good that the cook will be taught to govern the state; but what will there be if a Commissar is placed over the cook? Then she will never learn to govern the state’ (cited in Cohen 1971, 75). Only a little later, in The ABC of Communism (1920), he shifts the question of radical democracy and learning (by woman Cs in particular) into a more general question of raising the cultural level of the proletariat, especially the rural ones; but he continues to refer to the woman C: ‘We must do our utmost to secure that the widest strata of the proletarians and the poor peasants shall participate to the utmost of their power in the work of the soviets. In one of his pamphlets, published before the November revolution, Comrade Lenin wrote very truly that our task was to see that every cook should be taught to take her share in governmental administration. Of course this is by no means an easy job, and there are many hindrances to its realisation. First among such obstacles comes the low cultural level of the masses’ (§ 47, 171). ‘But in Russia, working women are far more backward than working men. Many people look down upon them. In this matter persevering efforts are needed: among men, that they may cease blocking women’s road; among women, that they may learn to make a full use of their rights, may cease to be timid or diffident. We must not forget that “every cook has to be taught to take her share in governmental administration” ’ (§ 50, 179).

While the emphasis here is on education through democratic participation, Alexandra Kollontai (1919) places it on the abolition of old forms: In communism, family and housework would become extinct because cooking would take place in communal kitchens, and meals would be taken in restaurants (253–55). Trotsky takes up Lenin’s impetus in 1935, referring also to the C-phrase, but no longer as a particular example of women’s emancipation: ‘In order to bring about a great social revolution, there must be for the proletariat a supreme manifestation of all its forces and all its capacities: the proletariat is organized democratically precisely in order to put an end to its enemies. The dictatorship, according to Lenin, should “teach every woman cook to govern the state” ’ (Whither France, 1979, 140).

5. Rosa Luxemburg orients decidedly toward conquering ‘political power not from above but from below’, whereas she understands mass education not as a precondition but as an accompanying consequence: ‘The masses must learn how to use power by using power. There is no other way to teach them’ (RLR, 372 et sq.). – Clara Zetkin sees the transformation of millions of ‘housemothers into workers’ (1920/1974, 432) as the prospect of mass emancipation of women. In her Reminiscences of Lenin (1929), she emphasised these ideas in particular and vigorously advocated the socialisation model against private households and their associated patriarchy: ‘Could there be a more damning proof of this [that the Communists are philistines] than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out in the petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened? […] We are bringing the women into the social economy, into legislation and government. All educational institutions are open to them, so that they can increase their professional and social capacities. We are establishing communal kitchens and public eating-houses, laundries and repairing shops, infant asylums, kindergartens, children’s homes, educational institutes of all kinds. In short, we are seriously carrying out the demand in our program for the transference of the economic and educational functions of the separate household to society’ (68 et sq.).

Concretely, Zetkin describes how the experiences and knowledge of peasant women are especially useful for the socialist project: ‘Women’s work is of great importance for collectivising potato and beet farming, dairy farming and creamery, and the cultivation and first processing of industrial crops such as flax, cotton, and more. Vegetable, fruit and berry growing, floriculture, poultry and small animal breeding, and agricultural business – for which women have acquired extensive experience and special skills in mastering them – can increase their yields considerably through collectivisation’ (Letter to Edda Baum 1930, Zur Theorie, 463). If the critique is essentially based on the unproductive nature of women’s work, then qualifications come into focus and the final consideration is that this development is precisely the way to conquer state power. As a result, she emphasises the change in feminine mentality: the attitudes to family, men, and society are ‘revolutionised’, and ‘hundreds of thousands of women who used to blare their patter that the man is the breadwinner of the family and that woman belongs at the hearth of the home – they have relearned through experience’ (433).

Bertolt Brecht in The Mother (1931) also calls upon the ‘wife in the kitchen’ to learn, because she ‘must be ready to take over the leadership’ (CP 3, 120, transl. corr.). As well as: ‘Don’t think the question of why your kitchen lacks meat / Will get decided in the kitchen’ (96, transl. corr.) Brecht, however, is not content with the abolition of the kitchen, and so he takes up the various dimensions of Lenin’s statements and expands them to include the perspective of a possible convergence of kitchen and state, so that one can learn from the other. ‘Mi-en-leh [Lenin] said, every woman cook ought to be able to govern the state. He was thinking of a change in the state as well as the woman cook. But you can also conclude from this that it’s advantageous to arrange the state like a kitchen, but also the kitchen like a state’ (Me-ti, 2016, 125). – The publishers of Brecht’s Complete Works claim that his source is Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 poem called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: ‘We’ll train every cook / so she might / manage the country / to the worker’s gain’ (1972, 227). Yet Brecht’s nuanced elaboration, standing in contrast to Mayakovsky’s one-line shortening, contradicts this. It is more likely that Brecht knew the C-phrase from Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, which appeared in German as early as 1920, and to which he refers in The Measures Taken (34).

After de-Stalinisation under Khrushchev, Ernst Bloch positioned the C-phrase against the ensuing continuation of the Stalinist repeal of Engels’s thesis of the withering away of the state. Even if the justification for the repeal – that socialism ‘has been victorious in one country while capitalism dominates in all [other] countries’ (Kerimov 1959, 142) – ‘itself was not counted as having withered away’, as Bloch notes with a clearly ironic undertone, ‘Engels’s formula – one of the rare (and this is quite interesting) ones that provoked official revision – is contained at the culminating point of his thought, that it is as difficult to hide as a mountain peak in the valley where it sits as a reminder of the goal […], in this there resides not only good conscience for the omnipotence of the state’ (Natural Law, 1961/1987, 226): ‘It can in fact be established that socialistic legal norms present themselves as codified solidarity pro rata for the production of an economic-political condition wherein, as Lenin said, every cook can rule the state and the state itself would no longer require any [juridical] codification’ (227). This condition ‘would be the first polis, because it is without politeia’ (228).

Gail W. Lapidus (1977) traces the political and economic background of Lenin’s politics. In 1922, only eight percent of the party members were women; the female population was largely illiterate and therefore could not be reached through newspapers and leaflets. Lapidus understands Lenin’s project of women’s inclusion as a completely new alliance of feminism with revolutionary socialism: the appeal to women to help support the economy in the state and to interfere in politics is seen as a struggle against old family structures and the ruling patriarchy (119).

6. Almost all of the transformations envisaged in the C-dictum – democracy from below, the learning of politics and economics, the socialisation of domestic work – remain unrealised or are stuck half-way; most of the work was already broken off in Soviet Union before it really started; only housework was largely socialised. In the GDR, for example, many institutions provided state-subsidised hot meals, for example in education, agriculture, industrial production, and administration. In the course of the capitalist restoration, the socialisation of housework and child-rearing that had begun was largely reversed, even though Western democracies strive to “reconcile career and family life” for women – but precisely within the boundaries of a private family solution.

In all the many-faceted ways that the C-dictum has been invoked, and although it was initially used to support the liberation of women, it remains on the whole true that it lacks any knowledge of cooking and domestic work; thus, here, a source can be identified for the forgetting of domestic work in Marxism. It cannot be assumed that women practised cooking as a skilled art in the kitchen and in the household. Nevertheless, the disregard of any practical qualifications in this field, which after all concerns essential elements in the shaping of life and the raising of the next generation, justified it being called ‘petty’, ‘dull’, etc. This remained a long tradition in the history of the workers’ movement, until the Second Women’s Movement in the 1970s stood up vigorously against it with the domestic labour debate.

In 1974, in the context of the reaction to the 1968 movement and its offshoots, André Glucksmann wrote a history of socialism from the point of view of the Gulag archipelago, as a horror scenario of ‘man-eating’ power. The woman C appears between the testimonies of survivors, remaining quite marginal, but is able to bring tension into the title of The Cook and the Cannibal. ‘Perhaps you already suspect that the famous cook, of whom Lenin writes that she should learn to run the socialist state – is quite capable of judging these fifty years of socialist life, even if she is mute, wedged between her old Russian oven, the work in the collective farm, the peat mines in which she must steal her fuel for the winter, and the memory of the man she lost in the war’ (1976, 22). In the arrest of hope, which was bound up with the cook, lies the criticism that surrenders even the unredeemed to absurd hopelessness.

In his film Babette’s Feast (1987), adapted from a novella by Karen Blixen, the Danish director Gabriel Axel has made an impressive monument to the figure of the woman C. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, a famous Parisian C and communard has to flee from the murderous reaction. In 1872, she comes to a remote Danish island village into a Protestant sect whose members live ascetically. After winning a lottery, she asks to be allowed to “cook French” for once. The feast, which begins in the agreed upon silence, turns into a major transformation. The C imparts to the bigoted, increasingly resentful community that salvation is not found beyond, but in this world. This C is an artist, her cooking is great art. – Once again, the C appears as a form of articulation of political protest – albeit without reference to Lenin – in the Buback Obituary as a criticism of the RAF’s strategy. ‘Why this politics of personalities? Couldn’t we all kidnap a woman cook together someday and see how they then respond, the upright democrats? Shouldn’t we be putting more of our focus on woman cooks?’ (Buback, 3) – The figure of the C also fascinates writers in Russian post-communism. In his novel Children of the Arbat (1987), Anatoly Rybakov allows Stalin to say that it would be better for the C to manage the kitchen well than to want to govern the state. – Yegor Gaidar, the neoliberal former prime minister of post-communist Russia, however, saw in 2006 ‘as the greatest risk that the woman cook enters political economy with a pistol’ (Isvestia, 7 May 2006). – In view of capitalism, which destroys life and resources, the discourse of the woman C as head of state ultimately reveals the gateway to the utopia of a liberated world.

Frigga Haug

Translated by Jacob Blumenfeld

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