a kitchen of one's own

It is, of course, not what Virginia Woolf meant when she declared the importance of, for each woman, a room of her own. She famously ‘killed’ the Angel in the House, Coventry Patmore’s idealisation of women’s role within the Victorian home. For Woolf, those ‘difficult arts of family life’ - for which women sacrifice themselves daily - get in the way of writing; if she can find her own space, she can create. 


I wonder if Woolf would have been sympathetic to what I mean, though. After all, she understood, intimately, the relationship between creativity and one’s living conditions. She wrote about the way that output is inevitably affected by ‘grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.’ Indeed, if she had remained under the patriarchal roof of 22 Hyde Park Gate, writing and books would have been ‘inconceivable’, she stated.


The ‘room’ that she prescribes to all women consists, I assume, of a desk, no doubt a lamp, some comfortable furnishings, and a ready supply of paper and ink. The room I have been thinking about is, conventionally speaking, the antithesis: a kitchen space. Unlike Woolf’s contemporaries, I was fortunate not to grow up enslaved to the domestic. Woolf’s descriptions of cooking (as opposed to her descriptions food itself) often evoke the drudgery of the mundane: chopping up suet, minding the stew, washing the dishes. From a childhood home supplied with seven servants, she understood these kitchen tasks as work which - if one could - one outsourced. While Woolf wanted women to ‘win‘ rooms from the men who had traditionally occupied them, she most definitely didn’t mean the kitchen, which had always been women’s domain, shackled and noosed to it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         But Woolf also famously wrote that ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ When she married, she had her own cook: Nellie Boxall was with the Woolfs for 18 years. After a particularly good meal at Marcel Boulestin’s restaurant in Covent Garden, Woolf even sent Nellie for lessons with the celebrity chef. Food was important enough to Woolf that one of the first things she did when she moved to Monk’s House was to install a new range, and she was known to cook a mean omelette, so she must have used the kitchen herself, and enjoyed doing so.


As well as (quite rightly and importantly) identifying the domestic space as one of enslavement for most women, Woolf was simultaneously able to take her own kitchen for granted: relatively privileged, she could afford this space of her own, and her cook could presumably take on the most tiresome tasks. 


Many have pointed out, in more recent years, the white middle-class privilege in Woolf’s essay. Most women would not have been able to experience the kitchen, let alone any other room, as a site of creativity; many women would not have even had adequate kitchen facilities to perform their ‘duties’. The story continues today, with women reportedly doing more than their fair share of domestic work, and with food poverty experienced by 11% of the UK population in 2022/23 - for those people, the kitchen (if such a space exists) is a site solely of worry.


I have always had access to kitchen spaces, which I have similarly taken for granted. More than that, I am ashamed to say, I have often bemoaned these spaces: I am of the generation of renters - for nearly two decades I have shared (sometimes battled for) kitchen space. As a first-year uni student, the ‘kitchen’ amounted to a microwave and a fridge. A few years later, I remember, the otherwise surprisingly generous space of the ‘communal’ kitchen was commandeered by one overpowering occupant who filled all the cupboards with her own belongings (and those of her boyfriend, who had apparently moved in) and filled the whole flat with the terrible smell of her cooking; her tyrannical rule meant that no one else dared enter the kitchen unless it was to do so as quickly as possible. Then there was the kitchenette in France: no room for an oven, a flat mate who licked cutlery clean instead of washing it, and the nice French lady who saw my pain and let me bake in her plush apartment adjacent to ours. 


Kitchens in flat shares are always tricky terrains, battle lines firmly drawn and navigated like a precise, sometimes seething, military operation: decisions over whose food will occupy the ‘good’ cupboard or drawer, who gets the ‘decent’ fridge shelf, what time you can each use the space, and whether an extra dinner guest is welcome (once you learn that an additional body in the already cramped area will spark a civil war, you start to give up on the invites, or pray fervently that your flat mates will be out).


Though a paid-up member of these flat shares, I often felt like Blanche, an intruder in Stanley and Stella’s kitchen in A Streetcar Named Desire, the site of most of the play’s confrontation. Occupying the kitchen for any length of time felt hazardous (though this is where the Streetcar analogy ends; my experience does not compare to Blanche’s terror). Not so long ago, I had only been renting there for a week when one of my flat mates issued a ‘cease and desist’ letter to the other for harassment (lockdown had really got to them); the flat was a battlefield, the only safe camp our own rooms. Bewildered and a bit concerned, I spent as little time in the flat as possible and made myself as small as I could when it came to using the kitchen. Nonetheless, I received an angry late-night text one evening about how inconsiderate it was of me to leave half a (neatly wrapped) loaf of bread on the kitchen side, from where I would retrieve it first thing in the morning. I marvelled at the regime into which I had unwittingly stepped. 


It was slightly better, I suppose, than the kitchen that was a permanent building site - I lived there for a year and a half, under the authority of a verbally abusive landlady who emptily promised to remove the fridge that jutted out across the kitchen and prevented access to most of it (most of the small house was out of bounds due to her ‘renovations’ which never progressed). On the kitchen step which gave onto the garden, she left an open container of her grown-up son’s urine ’to ward off the foxes’, the smell of which would waft in if the door was open. When I rented a flat with my then-boyfriend, I was excited after living for many years in over-crowded spaces: we could actually spend time cooking and even invite people over. On moving day, we discovered swathes of black mould growing behind the poorly ventilated and inaccessible units - despite months of communication with a classically disinterested and loaded London landlord, the kitchen never quite recovered, inauspicious perhaps for the multiple subsequent kitchens that never felt welcoming.


For some, it might be a football pitch, a cycling track, or an easel that is the site of creativity. For me, making food for others has always been an important way of expressing myself. And, while desperately trying not to sound like a Trad Wife, the type of food that most interests me is food made from scratch, whether that’s a handmade loaf, a kombucha brewed at home, or a dish made from foraged or homegrown products. I remember feeling a certain sense of aspirational integrity within the Arts and Crafts Movement, pioneered by the likes of William Morris, when I studied it at uni: their shunning of the manufactured product and their celebration of artisanal practice resonated with me. Coupled with a later interest in sustainability and the environment, this manifested itself as a motivation to go right back to the culinary source, both in terms of ingredient and method. This sort of cooking is, quite simply, not practical in a shared area: aside from the space-sucking equipment required, proving dough for hours on end in a heavily contested no man’s land, or combing through insect-ridden elderberry branches on the dining table, is a sure way to get evicted. 


I tried to get round this as much as I could: I was known for brewing kombucha in my own room, until I started to get concerned about the lingering smell on my clothes! If heading to my parents’ home for the weekend, I would prove my sourdough on the M4, having mixed it up at work. Anything to avoid the wrath of the flat mate. This sort of culinary experiment needs time, space, and the patience of other people. I’m grateful to have borrowed - for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon - friends and family members’ kitchens for such purposes when I had all but stopped cooking and baking in my flat shares. 


While these minor inconveniences have helped me appreciate the value of a kitchen space, the reality is that I am extremely privileged. Due to poverty levels, many people do not have such spaces, hence the need for charities such as Cook Up, which provides cooking spaces ‘for anyone who needs access to one’, such as asylum seekers and homeless people. Even when people have access to a space, it may not be safe (look at the Grenfell tragedy and the campaign work of Kwajo Tweneboa) and/or it may not be possible to use it for other reasons, such as rising fuel and food costs. 


For the 11% of households in the UK experiencing food poverty, nutritious - let alone creative, experimental and fun - cooking is inconceivable. The increasing number of pupils on free school meals (24.6% were eligible in 2023-24), the ever-rising demands on food banks, and the great need for charities such as Kitchen Social (which provides children in London with meals during school holidays) all prove the dire situation. Furthermore, kitchen classrooms in schools are underused or non-existent: the opportunity to learn to cook and have fun experimenting in the kitchen has been on a serious decline within education for decades. While there are food education policies in place within the national curriculum, in reality, funding, facilities and other academic pressures mean that food education takes a back seat in many educational environments, so much so that the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation found it impossible to get an accurate picture of the data. 


At the other end of the social spectrum stand the perfectly architectured kitchens of the upper and upper-middle classes. Spacious, tasteful, incredibly Instagrammable, these comprehensively appointed kitchens can, in theory, produce restaurant-worthy cuisine and house large dinner parties. For dramatically different and incomparable reasons, however, many of these spaces also remain unused: the most interesting aspect of the current Trad Wife trend on Instagram and TikTok is not so much the regressive, anti-feminist politics of these women but, rather, the way that working women across the UK, US and beyond have been drawn into this algorithm. These women would never wish to trade in their life for one of kitchen-sink servitude, but - in a disconcerting echo of what Betty Friedan in 1963 called the ‘feminine mystique’ - they find themselves nonetheless drawn to this picture of apparent domestic comfort, security, and fulfilment, in which unimaginable hours of freedom might be devoted to crafting the perfect loaf, time to oneself which happily doubles up as nourishment rather than ‘neglect’ of loved ones. 


The Trad Wife trend is a backlash to the Sheryl Sandberg ‘lean in’ movement, which made false promises about a level of fulfilment at work that is really only available to the most successful women, the luckiest, and the richest (who can outsource childcare and domestic tasks). It’s also a response to Covid, which exacerbated the chaos of the home for many women, who carry an unfair proportion of the domestic burden. No wonder women are drawn to the Trad Wife idea that women might be able to create domestic bliss without running themselves ragged. It’s precisely because this life is out of reach for the vast majority that these videos are so popular. Between financial and family responsibilities, we are more likely to order in a takeaway than make our own meal, let alone experiment with cheese or butter making, staples of the Trad Wife video and representative of their time-rich lifestyles. 


We desire what we don’t have. For Woolf that was a space in which to write; for women today it’s domestic ease and relief from time-consuming and stressful jobs. Relatively affluent, but time and energy starved, no wonder women covet the kitchen space from time to time, for the sense of security, simplicity, and creativity that it can suggest. In reality, the beautiful kitchen remains a showroom. 


It’s nothing new: women were just as enthralled by Martha Stewart who - literally - sold a domestic dream that was too time-consuming and out-of-reach for most, ironically, even for her, whose business took her out of the home. Stewart made a financial success of the kitchen which helped her escape it, and the same is happening with the Trad Wives (many of whom can only be a Trad Wife because they - or, more accurately and disturbingly, their husbands - had a lot of money to start with). 


That’s not going to happen for the majority of us, and most of us wouldn’t want it anyway. As Woolf knew, living well requires physical and emotional space, which means it also requires time and money. Balancing motherhood, family life, poverty and/or a career, what women are really looking for, then, is not an idealised feminine domesticity suggested by the Trad Wives. Instead, as Joan Didion pointed out 24 years ago, they want power, so that the rooms they and their families need become their own secure domain.