Contradictory Cookbooks: Print, Protest, and Feminism in Women's Community Cookbooks

This is a Featured Preorder* for a book that will be published November 3, 2026.

This is what the publisher tells us about this book:

How a surprising set of diverse women used cookbooks to bridge seemingly contradictory aspects of their lives and effect change.

Contradictory Cookbooks offers a historical exploration of how women merged their voluntary, professional, and political interests through DIY cookbook publishing. Although cookbooks are often associated with the domestic and traditional, Barth reveals that the production of community cookbooks in the second half of the twentieth century was increasingly taken up by working women, women involved in student and civil rights movements, and women fighting for the cause of second-wave feminism. Barth reveals why, at a time that perhaps seems surprising and unlikely, women from a broad range of backgrounds and interest groups produced these culinary texts.

Drawing on hundreds of American community cookbooks as well as archival research from American women’s organizations, Contradictory Cookbooks argues that through the production and sale of fundraising cookbooks, women found a means to bridge sometimes contradictory aspects of their lives.

Ellen Barth is a research and teaching associate at the University of Münster, where she earned her doctorate in English Philology. Her work centers on book studies, women’s book history, second-wave feminist print culture, and the role of women’s clubs in American publishing and literary history. She has published research on the topics of feminist craftivism and menstrual activism. Originally from the United States, she now resides in Germany.

Paperback with black and white archival images.