Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr.

  • Charles, Nickie.
Date:
[1988], ©1988
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Introduction 7 mothers and daughters (Chemin, 1983 and 1986; Lawrence, 1984; MacLeod, 1981; Orbach, 1981). These feminists, however, all write from the perspective of women's psychology. Our analysis, as we said at the outset, is sociological and as such it focuses on the social factors which shape women's experiences as the servers and providers of food within families. Methodology Two hundred women with at least one child who was under school age were each interviewed twice during 1982 and 1983. The interviews were separated by a gap of a fortnight, during which time the women kept diary records of the food and drink consumed by everyone in their household. As our study was sociological rather than nutritional, we did not ask that the women weigh and measure what they ate, but they did give some indication of the relative size of helpings eaten by different family members. This enabled us, in the second interview, to ask about the different amounts of food eaten by men and women, adults and children, as well as discussing other aspects of the family's diets. The interviews were tape-recorded and, later, transcribed and coded for the computer. The material we have is therefore qualitative, as we included many open-ended ques¬ tions which gave the women the chance to talk freely, and quantitative, as the sample was large enough to produce useful statistical data. The interviews covered a very wide range of topics all of which involved food within the family. We asked women about the allocation of tasks such as food shopping, preparation and cooking and decision making. We explored the factors which led to certain foods being eaten rather than others, such as partners' and children's likes and dislikes, the cost of food, its nutritional values, and so on. The role of food within marriage and the way that giving up work and having children affects the food eaten were talked about, as was the way that men influence the family's diet. We asked women about the daily diet and how it changed at weekends and on holidays, and we asked them to describe the sorts of food and drink they consumed on special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays. We talked to them in some detail about feeding children, about the relationship