Sweetness and Femininity: the place of women in the consumption of sugar during eighteenth century Britain

The University of Northampton – MA Social and

Cultural History

HISM019 - Dissertation - 2011

Sweetness and Femininity: the place

of women in the consumption

of sugar during

eighteenth century Britain

Bertilia Leite

SN: 06236421

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Word-count: 14.954

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Illustration: Oil,Sweetness and Femininity, by Bertilia Leite

Contents

Introduction, 5

Chapter I – Patronesses of sugar, 12

Chapter II – Delights for and from ladies, 17

3

Chapter III – A universal agreement? 25

Chapter IV – Home, sweet home, 35

Conclusion, 42

Bibliography, 45

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For Americo,

whose wife was full of cookery

skills

Introduction

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In 1715 Dr. Frederick Slare, a physician and a member

of the Royal Society, wrote one of the most intriguing

vindications connecting women to the consumption of

sugar, A Vindication of Sugars, which was intended to defend

the ‘defamed’ product from the current opposition

already taking place at his time. 1 To give more

credibility to this product he elected Ladies the

‘Patronesses of Fair Sugar’. The fact that women were

considered by Slare more experienced with sugar

indicates how much the consumption of such a foreign

and previously exotic commodity was becoming

generalized in British society, in spite of those who

condemned its use. One of the main justifications given

by Slare to elect women ‘more competent Judges of

Taste’ was the assumption that they were naturally more

inclined to ‘accurate and refined Palates’ than men,

whose tastes were seen as corrupted by the use of

wines, pickles and tobacco.2 This kind of natural

association between sugar and the female gender is

indeed older than Slare and, as I intend to show

through the present dissertation, it kept echoing

through the centuries until becoming a cultural cliché.

The association between woman and sugar took different

forms, sometimes evoking women’s sensuality, in others

recognizing their cooking expertise, like in the case

1 Frederick Slare. A Vindication of Sugars against the Charge of Dr. Willis, other Physicians, and Common Prejudices, Dedicated to Ladies (London, Tim. Goodwin, 1715). During Slare’s time the majority of vindications on sugar was indeed destined to attack it. 2 Ibid, introduction.

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above, and at other times denouncing their fragility.

In the classic Delightes for Ladies, a cookbook written by

Hugh Plat in 1602, women were already compared to the

sweetness of sugar cane in a courteous introductory

poem in which they were referred to as being ‘of sweets

[...] the sweetest creatures’.3

Realizing in the connection between women and sugar an

old and curious perception towards gender, my target

became to identify the origin of these associations. As

known, sugar was an extremely expensive commodity

during the Middle Ages and even at the beginning of the

modern era it was still only consumed by the

aristocracy, which used to display conserves of fruits

and sculptures done in sugar to impress the guests

during banquets. It is here, apparently, that the

closer involvement of women with sugar starts, for the

confectionary art demanded careful skills from

aristocratic ladies.4 With the settlement of

plantations in the Americas sugar started to come to

England in increasing quantities and with dropping

prices, and from being a luxury it started to be a mass

consumed commodity. The opportunity of being involved

in the confectionary art, which had previously been a

3 Sir Hugh Plat. Delightes for Ladies to adorn their persons, tables, closets, and destillatories: with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters (London, H. Lownes, 1608 – first edition 1602). 4 For a study of the involvement of women with sugar during the seventeenth century, see Kim P. Hall. ‘Culinary spaces, colonial spaces: the gendering of sugar in the seventeenth century’, in V.Traub, M.Kaplan, D. Callaghan (eds). Feminist readings of early modern culture: emerging subjects (Cambridge, 1996), p. 176.

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privilege of aristocratic ladies until the middle of

seventeenth century extended to women of middle class

and later to all remaining women in the kingdom. Since

hundreds of new recipes were created for the absorption

of this strange and foreign commodity, cookbooks

started to represent one of the main tools in the

kitchen to help women to achieve social recognition

through their culinary skills. The feminine involvement

with sugar, however, did not come without an exhaustive

accumulation of domestic work, as easily realised in

the early cookbooks.5 At this point some questions

emerged about the involvement of Early Modern British

women with sugar. How was the consumption of sugar

identified as a woman’s affair? Why, despite the huge

trouble to bring sweetness to the table, was sugar many

times connected to the sensual side of femininity? Did

contemporary women realise this connection in the same

way? Are there any kinds of sources written by women to

confirm or contest assumptions like these? What kind of

contemporary cultural practices involving sugar and

women can be considered?

The journey in the search of some answers to the

questions above took a considerably tough road. As a

Brazilian I was initially led to look for a subject 5 There is a current historical debate whether better off women physically involved themselves in domestic work during Early Modern period; see Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability (Routledge, 2002), p. 177; Amanda Vickery. ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, The Historical Journal, 36, 2, (1993), pp. 383-414.

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that could join my own historical interests to what had

been studied during my post graduation studies in

Social and Cultural History in England. At a first

guess I found that colonialism could suit my purposes,

but because the British Empire did not extend to Brazil

I still needed to find a link between the two countries

in the context of the eighteenth century. The answer

was sugar. But, could such a trivial commodity give me

enough material? Some initial readings such as Clare

Midgley’s Feminism and Empire,6 Woodruff Smith’s Consumption

and the Making of Respectability,7 and Sidney Mintz’ Sweetness

and Power8, among others, started to delineate my

research. After exploring this material I was already

astonished by the rich quantity of references and the

infinite possibilities of working in a subject like

sugar. In the process of my research further authors

gave me a better glimpse of how to turn the subject

into a social and cultural concern and in order to try

an approach adjusted to the most recent researches, I

concluded that the traditional connection between sugar

and slavery should not be my focus, since so much has

already been written about this by historians,

anthropologists, sociologists and economists. New

concerns associating the consumption of sugar during

the eighteenth century to gender should be, in my 6 Clare Midgley. Feminism and Empire: Women Activism in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865 (Routledge, 2007); and Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (Routledge, 1992).7 Smith, Respectability (2002).8 Sidney Mintz. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, Penguin, 1985).

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opinion, more relevant to the course’s contents and

perfectly fitted to the most recent theories and

discussions on studies in social and cultural history.

Although there is not so much in the historiography

about the consumption of sugar specifically focused on

gender, the acceptance of the important roles played by

women in society during Early Modern History is

becoming common sense among recent scholars. An

interesting recent essay, for instance, considers that

it is possible to understand the importance of women

through the growing consumption of foreign luxury goods

during the seventeenth century. 9 Smith’s analysis of

domestic femininity and the ritual of tea drinking,

which was surrounded by the consumption of overseas

products, suggests that women played a central role in

the home.10 Midgley and Sussman, on the other hand,

demonstrate the importance of women in the boycott of

sugar during the anti-slavery campaigns at the very end

of eighteenth century.11 It is also a relevant

consideration that although women were ‘confined’ in

the household, home demand was indeed essential for

commercial capitalism; and since the role played by

women was dominant in the domestic environment,

domestic consumer choice was also dominated by them.12

9 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 16910 Smith, Respectability, p. 172.11 Midgley, Feminism and Empire; Charlotte Sussman, ‘Women and the politics of sugar, 1792’, Representations, 48, 1994.12 Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 25.

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It is also curious to notice that in 1913 the German

sociologist Werner Sombart had already connected the

importance of women to consumer choice suggesting the

intimate connection between luxury and women and how

they were ‘exceedingly significant for the genesis of

capitalism’.13 The specific reference to sugar in his

analysis pointing out that ‘because of the predominant

role of women during the early capitalism, sugar

rapidly became a favourite food’ is vehemently

criticized by Mintz, who refuses to endorse his

assumption.14 From the title of his study Mintz

already makes clear, very different from Sombart, that

the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an ‘artefact’

for profit sought by tradesmen.15 In addition, he is

criticizing not only Sombart but all those male writers

who saw a ‘curious expectation that women will like

sweet things more than men’.16 Just like Slare and

Plat, Sombart is still echoing as something natural that

feminine gender and consumption of sugar is a

‘universal agreement’.17 Although women had for

centuries been involved in the transformation of sugar

into edible sweetness through a huge amount of domestic

work, why did fantasizing connections between sugar and

woman become culturally solidified? The dual meaning of

these kinds of connections has become the focus of my 13 Werner Sombart. Luxury and Capitalism (The University of Michigan, 1967 – first edition Germany 1913), p. 95.14 Ibid, p. 99; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 140. 15 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 186.16 Ibid, p. 150. 17 Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, p. 99.

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discussion, through which I intend to explore the roles

played by women in the context of sugar consumption

during Early Modern England.

In order to understand the practices behind the

consumption of sugar I found that the investigation of

early cookbooks could give me some answers. It has been

recognised that cookbooks played an important role

during the Early Modern age because they were more than

a compilation of food recipes, being rather domestic

manuals which became one of the most published kind of

book after the Bible.18 Although still treated as a

spice, sugar was everywhere in these books, from sweet

to savoury dishes. Like any other publication,

cookbooks were initially published under male

authorship, but in England they were soon dedicated to

women, like Plat’s Delightes for Ladies.19 However, it can be

observed in other cases, like in John Partridge20 and

Gervase Markham,21 that the manuscripts for the content

of cookbooks actually came from women’s hands, as both 18 Hall, ‘Culinare spaces’, p. 170.19 According to the introduction of this edition, written by G. E.Fussel, Hugh Plat can be best remembered, beyond his cookbook, forhis works on mechanic, agricultural theories and methods of sowingseeds, in Hugh Plat. Delightes for Ladies (London, Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1948), p. 25.20 John Partridge. The Treasurie of commodious conceits and hidden secrets, commonly called the good huswives closet of provision for the health of the household (London, 1585 ).21 Gervase Markham. The English Housewife: containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986 – first edition London, 1615). Markham, like Plat, also wrote important books about agriculture and gardening, helping to develop more effective agricultural methods during his time, in J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbranham. The Englishman’s Food: a history of five centuries of English diet (London, John Cape, 1939), p. 112.

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reveal in their introduction. But Markham goes much

beyond the recipes, surrounding the original female

manuscript with much advice about the ‘right’ place of

the English housewife in the making of domesticity. He

says, for example, that women should be ‘godly,

constant, religious [...] pleasant, amiable, and

delightful’.22 Nevertheless, cooking is understood as

the main attribute desired in a housewife, ‘a duty

really belonging to a woman’.23 After reading Markham

it becomes clear that certain Early Modern cookbooks

were not only used as domestic tools for the

preparation of food, they also served to propagate

ideologies and as said by Hall they ‘articulated the

practices that defined the English home and the women’s

place in it’.24 What ordinary women did think about

their own domestic duties during Markham’s time is a

bit harder to find out, for there is not much published

material left by them. In the mid-eighteenth century,

however, women started to assume the authorship of

cookbooks, which became best-sellers from the

beginning. Three female cookbook writers are going to

be considered in this dissertation: Hannah Glasse,

Eliza Smith, and Elizabeth Price.25 From a quick

22 Markham, The English Housewife, p. 7.23 Ibid, p. 60.24 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 184.25 Hannah Glasse. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London, 1747); Smith, E. The Complet Housewife: or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion (Alexandria, Virginea by Cottom & Stewart, 1805 – first edition London, 1747); Elizabeth Price. The new, universal, and complete confectioner; being the whole art of confectionary made perfectly plain and easy. Containing full account of all the various methods of preserving and candying

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glimpse at their work it is hard to verify in the

contents any intention of wishing to display themselves

as sweet creatures because they were dealing to a great

extent with sugar. Therefore, my initial hypothesis is

that there was a conflict of social interests pushing

the connection between femininity and sweetness into a

dual set of meanings: on the one hand, as realised in

male writings, women are fancifully connected to sugar,

either in a sense of sensuality or fragility; on the

other, as observed in the women’s own material,

sweetness is nothing more than the demonstration of

skills through exhaustive domestic work.

The organization of the present dissertation is as

follows. Chapter one opens with an outlook on the

introduction of sugar in the English market and how it

changed from a luxury to a mass consumed commodity. I

also explore the ways in which sugar and domesticity

were soon intertwined in England, making women play

important roles in the increase of sugar consumption.

Subsequently, in chapter two, I attempt to show the

importance of early cookbooks by analysing them as my

primary sources. Both Early Modern and eighteenth

century publications are focused, mainly concerned with

the differences in the use of sugar, their

peculiarities towards culinary expertise, and the

matter of female authorship. The innovative recipes

(London, A. Hogg, 1785?).

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found in the cookbooks written by women and how

troublesome it became to bring sweetness to the tables,

in the context of other cultural changes during the

eighteenth century, is the main purpose of this

chapter. Thereafter, I devote to demonstrating in

chapter three the ways in which women were connected to

sweetness from the male perspective. To do so, I

mention some authors I could detect this connection,

from Hugh Plat at the very beginning of the seventeenth

century to Werner Sombart during the twenty century.

Behind the analysis of this kind of ‘anxious’ male

literature is the search for the reason why, even

clearly observing the heavy weight that sugar

represented on the majority of women’s shoulders, some

scholars still connected sweetness to the sensual or

fragile side of femininity. Finally, in chapter four, I

explore the cultural environment in which women and

sugar were immersed. First, I will discuss woman’s task

of clarifying sugar before its addition to conserves of

fruits and other sweets. Then my work becomes devoted

to analysing the social rituals developed around the

consumption of sugar such as aristocratic banqueting

and the middle classes’ tea drinking time, both in the

context of women as important agents of changing habits

around eating times. This dissertation though, does not

intend to present any definitive answer to the academic

discussions on the consumption of sugar and the roles

played by women toward this practice during eighteenth

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century England. The exercise of giving voice to those

anonymous female cooks, whose sweetness was constantly

on the tables throughout the centuries, is already in

itself a delightful task.

Chapter I – Patronesses of sugar

Sugar, from a practically unknown product for the

majority of European people until the end of Middle

Ages became the central edible item in modern

consumerism. At the end of the eighteenth century the

consumption of sugar in Britain reached an astonishing

increase of 2,500 per cent, a performance with no

parallel in the world history of food.26 Indeed, 26 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 73. Mintz figure, however, is not intune with the one provided by Shammas, who says that taking in consideration ‘the consumption per lbs per capita between 1663 and

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changes occurred in Europe between 1600 and 1800 not

only in the demand of sugar but also in the demand of

other colonial products such as tea, coffee, and cocoa.

Although it has been said that during the eighteenth

century England experienced a major alteration in the

types of consumer goods, much of the important changes

that occurred in consumption were centred on the use of

these colonial products, which became staple beverages

of daily life for Europeans, even among the poorer

classes.27 The ‘Consumer Revolution’,28 which may be

understood in the present dissertation as mainly based

on the consumption of non-European products, led

society to change its habits around eating. Sugar

unquestionably played an important role in this change,

since from all colonial products it was by far the most

imported one, covering 80% of total British imports.29

In fact, large quantity of the imported sugar had

already been retained for domestic consumption since

the seventeenth century and although it was still

1799, the consumption of sugar jumped from 2.13 to 24.16’, which represents a growth of around 1.150 percent; in Carole Shammas. ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American consumption from 1550 to 1800’, in John Brewer and Porter, R. (eds.) Consumption and the World of Goods (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 182.27 Smith, Respectability, p. 7.28 McKendrick thesis is that there was a consumer boom during eighteenth century England which reached revolutionary proportions. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birthof a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (IndianaUniversity Press, 1985), p. 9. 29 This account also considers the importation of other sugar-based products such as molasses and rum. For an international comparison, for instance, it is said that the quantity of sugar exported to France did not represent even half per cent of all exports in the same period. Smith, Respectability, p. 204.

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expensive, England was the country in Europe to consume

the highest quantity of sugar.30 Because this product

was so desired in the country, sugar and domesticity

became intertwined and the sweetness provided by sugar

cane was soon connected to women. Based on concerns

with questions about gender, which are leading

historians nowadays to challenge the past

historiography typically written by men, I also try in

this study to bring to light the obscured participation

of women in Early Modern British society.31 In the

context of the consumption of sugar during the

seventeenth century it has been assumed, for example,

that ‘between preserves and conserves’ women, despite

being limited to their domestic sphere, participated in

the growth of sugar consumption, helping with this to

change the economy of the country.32 In addition, as

will be shown further, the involvement of women with

sugar ended up not only changing the economy of the

country but also social habits. Specifically focused

30 N. Steengaard. ‘The growth and composition of the long-distance trade of England and the Dutch before 1750’, in J. Trace (ed.). The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1990), p. 138; Smith also assumes that the British decline in the re-exportation of sugar can be explained by the increase of domestic consumption. Smith, Respectability, p. 271; with another comparison to France, in 1750 this country re-exported 93 percent of the total imported sugar. Gunther Lottes. ‘Sidney Mintz on sugar; or how Anglo-Saxon is world history?’, Food &Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment. Vol. 2, No. 2, 1987, p. 122.31 The main recent historians to relate the consumption of sugar to feminine gender are Clare Midgley, Charlotte Sussman, Kim Hall, and Woodruff Smith. Amanda Vickery has also been considered for her concerns around women and domestic consumption during the eighteenthcentury. 32 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces, colonial spaces’, p. 169.

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here are the habits related to eating times, which

became during the eighteenth century surrounded by

sugar. But how, from being practically unknown, was

sugar transformed into a mass consumed product? Why was

it soon identified with women? To answer these

questions it is necessary to briefly explain how sugar

was introduced into the British market place from the

Middle Ages.

Before reaching a boom in consumerism during the

eighteenth century, sugar had a very slow introduction

in Europe and although it had reached England in 1100

A.D.33, there are references to the use of sugar as far

back as Indian literature around 350 B.C.34 During

Ancient times sugar was also known by the Macedonians,

Persians, and Romans. With the invasion of Spain by the

Arabs in 711 A.D., it was spread around the

Mediterranean basin until reaching Venice in 996, which

became for many centuries the major re-export centre of

sugar in Europe.35 During the Middle Ages it was a

status commodity, being extremely expensive and

therefore considered a luxury used in small quantities

33 The first bulk shipment of sugar to England is recorded to have occurred in 1319, when it was exchanged for wool; but when the ship was directing to Flanders the cargo was taken in the Channel by English pirates, who killed both the captain and his men. Noel Deerr. The History of Sugar (London, Chapman & Hall, 1949), p. 526.34 For the preparation of rice pudding. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 19.35 Ibid, pp.23-4.

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in medicines and as a spice by the richest in

society.36 With the coming of the Modern Age the sugar

industry changed from Venetian to Portuguese control,

moving from the Mediterranean basin to the Atlantic

islands. The discovery of the Americas gave to Portugal

the opportunity to move its production to Brazil, where

the installation of big plantations based on the

slavery system started to take place.37 This kind of

mass production changed forever the character of

consumption of sugar in Europe, for it shifted its

condition from rarity to commonplace. In 1625, Portugal

was supplying virtually all Europe with sugar from

Brazil.38 But although sugar became more available it

was still expensive and only affordable by the elite,

therefore its consumption signalled class

distinction.39 Sugar was considered such a worthy

product that it was blended with other precious spices

in the cooking of meats and even combined with crushed

pearls and precious stones in the preparation of

medicines.40 The respect evoked by sugar came to be so

stressed that it is possible to find reference to the

36 See Smith, Respectability, p. 93; and Mintz, Sweetness, p. 30.37 During the sixteenth century Brazil had the greatest productionof sugar. Deerr, The History of Sugar, p. 104.38 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 38.39 Smith. Respectability, p. 93; Even though with a larger production in the New Word, a pound of sugar still cost ‘as much as a labourer’s wage for days’ work’. Shammas, ‘Changes in English consumption’, p. 182.40 Mintz, Sweetness, p. 154.

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‘noble Indian plant’ as deserving more devotion than

‘other idols of polished marble, or gold, or silver’.41

From the middle of the seventeenth century England

drove Portugal away from its sugar market, making this

product the main production of the West Indies. The

constant increasing production of sugar in the colonies

led the country to a growing importance in the world

trade, serving as the initial source for the

accumulation of its wealth.42 The plantations in the

Caribbean started then to feed alone the growing demand

for the consumption of sugar in Britain. During this

time, economically known as mercantilism, planters used

to obtain protective duties to ensure the monopoly of

the nation’s domestic market of sugar,43 and as a

result immense fortunes were made, mainly because

prices were kept high. A certain enthusiasm for the

consumption of sugar started to grow in the political

and economic environment, for it was in tune with the

British expansionism. Thus, appeals for the use of

sugar reached other professionals such as bankers,

judges, writers, and physicians. Dr. Slare, for

example, referred with admiration, in the introduction

of his Vindication of Sugars, to the West Indian merchant

‘who loads his Ships with this sweet Treasure [...] and

from thence have gained such Wealth, as to return to

41 Slare, F. A Vindication of Sugars, p.16.42 Mintz, Sweetness, p. 66. Mintz is following here Eric Hobsbawn’s explanation for the consolidation of sugar consumption in Britain.Hobsbawn, E. Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1968), pp. 144-45.43 Midgley, Feminism and Empire, p. 44.

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their native country very Rich’.44 Attorneys, drapers,

grocers, and barbers, who also benefited from the sugar

trade, probably read Dr. Slare’s words with enthusiasm.

Moreover, this enthusiasm was also attuned to the

process of industrialization and modernization, since

sugar cane had to be modified before use, symbolizing

the coming of a new era in food consumption. However,

when general commercial interests grew irritated with

the isolated planters’ advantage with such a ‘noble

plant’, the old protection was removed and the price

came down, definitely transforming sugar from a luxury

to a mass consumed commodity. From then on the

consumption of sugar was gradually democratized towards

the middle classes. At the beginning of the eighteenth

century, when women had already become the ‘patronesses

of sugar’, British society gave birth to new social

rituals heavily dependent on the consumption of sugar

(and other colonial commodities) like the tea drinking

time, in which women shared with sugar a central role

on the stage of changing habits of sociability, as I

intend to show in the fourth and last part of this

dissertation. However, before reaching the tables as

the main ingredient for the ritual of tea drinking

sugar suffered yet another process of transformation,

which took place behind the scenes. Through the

domestic toil of their kitchens women represented the

main agents of this transformation. Taking early

cookbooks as primary sources I will analyse in the next44 Slare, Vindication of Sugars (1715), introduction.

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chapter how these books reveal the astonishing increase

in the use of sugar and how laborious was the

involvement of women with this commodity during Early

Modern Britain.

Chapter II – Delights for and from

ladies

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Cookbooks became essential tools for the change of

eating habits. From Early Modern times they started to

be increasingly important for the elaboration and the

spread of new recipes to absorb an over-flooded

commodity like sugar. The first English cookbook is

dated from late fourteenth century, when sugar was

still connected to the courts, being a rare and

expensive commodity used in small quantities as

flavouring and spice.45 Although the recommendation for

the use of sugar increased in cookbooks over the next

centuries, it was still considered a luxury and in such

context both spices and sugar represented consumer

articles with sensual qualities which provided dishes

with a variety of delightful tastes.46 The main uses of

sugar observed in the early cookbooks were for the

preparation of meats, soups, pies, salads, wines,

confection of marchpane, conservation of fruits

(sweetmeats), marmalades, and the making of medicines.

As we can see, there was an indiscriminate use of sugar

both in savoury and sweet dishes, but it rather

happened because sugar was not considered a main

ingredient, it was more recommended as ‘some’ or ‘a

little’ along with other spices such as ginger, mace,

cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and so on.

45 Mintz, Sweetness, pp. 82-4. ‘The Forme of Cury’ was compiled in about 1390 by the master- cooks of Richard II.

46 Smith, Respectability, p. 93.

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The mechanization of bookmaking from the middle of the

fifteenth century made the printing process much easier

and consequently cookbooks started to proliferate in

England, becoming, like sugar, a mass consumption

product. The combination of these Early Modern super

industrialized products was that in the English

cookbooks the use of sugar was recommended in around 40

to 50 percent of the recipes, whilst, in contrast, in

the French cookbooks this stayed under 20 percent.47

Early cookbooks were, however, more than a compilation

of recipes; they also contained commentaries on the

implication of various foods for health,48 sugar being

used as an important ingredient for the preparation of

medicines.49 John Partridge’s sixteenth century

cookbook displays a great concern with health in his

recipes saying, for example, that ‘The conserue of

Strawberies is good against a hot liuer, or burning of

the stomack, and specially in the feruent heate of an

ague’.50 At least half of a total of his 67 recipes

takes sugar, whilst for the preparation of medicines,

which consists of a mixture of diverse flowers, all of

them take it.51 During the Middle Ages sugar was indeed

the main ingredient for all remedies destined to be

47 C. Fischeler. ‘Is sugar really an opium of the people?’, in Food & Foodways, p.143.48 Smith, Respectability, p. 125.49 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 172.50 Partridge, The treasure of commodious conceites (1585).

51 Ibid, these medicines were destined to cure problems of stomach, heart, bowels, melancholy, choler, and fever.

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used against the Black Death, and even during the last

plague of London in 1665 products derived from sugar

were still in use. Daniel Defoe mentions in his book

The Journal of the Year Plague that ‘Venice Treacle is

sufficient of it self to resist the Contagion [...] I

several times took Venice Treacle and a sound Sweat

upon it, and thought my self as well fortified against

the Infection as any one could be fortified by the

Power of Physic’.52 A London quack in 1665 advertised

his ‘infallible’ medicines against the plague, but in

the case where they were ineffective then he recommends

to ‘hold in [the] mouth a bit of Sugar-candy’.53

According to Markham one of the most principal

attributes desired in a woman was the preservation of

her family’s health. The ‘soundness of body’ consisted

of her having ‘a physical kind of knowledge; how to

administer many wholesome receipts or medicines for the

good of their healths’.54 As seen above, the use of

sugar for the confection of medicines was unanimous

until the seventeenth century, and even during the next

century cookbooks were still displaying recipes for the

52 Although Defoe’s novel is a fiction, he attempts to reconstitute the last plague in London apparently based on information left by his uncle, who was a pressman in the city at the time. Daniel Defoe.A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin, 2003 – first edition 1722), p. 230; Treacle can be understood as the same of syrup, made during the refining of sugar cane; In Eliza Smith’s cookbook there is a ‘Dr. Burgess’s Antidote against the Plague’ which still takes muskadine, diverse spices, and Venice Treacle as ingredients. Smith, The Complete Housewife (London, 1758), p. 267-8.53 Richard Barker’s memorandum of 1665, in Defoe, A Journal, p. 239-47 (Appendix). 54 Markham, The English Housewife, p. 8.

26

preparation of medicines with this product. Eliza

Smith’s The Complete Housewife of 1758 still has dozens of

recipes about how to prepare remedies with the addition

of sugar.55 In the introduction of her book she says

that the distribution of medicines for the poor

neighbourhood is a duty of a ‘generous, charitable, and

Christian Gentlewoman’.56 With this it is possible to

understand that women and sugar were also intertwined

in the context of health.

It was not only skills for the health of her family

that a lady should pursue. From the sixteenth century

sugar also started to be used as the main ingredient

for aristocratic banquets. The mixture of almonds and

fine sugar produced a paste called marchpane (marzipan)

which was used in the confection of structures to

decorate tables. In Robert May’s cookbook it is

possible to find instructions of how to elaborate an

amazing structure consisting of marchpane, miniatures of

a ship, cannons, and soldiers, with live frogs and

birds trapped in the structure, for the ‘entertainment

and delight of guests’ during the banquet.57 Complex

recipes of how to prepare marchpane can also be found 55 They are medicines intended to cure the plague, fever, small-pox, cancerous breast, consumption, husband’s distemper, stomach, cough, rheumatism, scurvy, lungs, stop bleeding, kidney stone, delivery after-pains, flux, cold and so on, in Smith, Eliza. The Complete Housewife, pp. 255-371.56 Ibid, p. 5. On her studies about the Georgian’s women, Amanda Vickery also confirms that the production and charitable distribution of medicines was a traditional aspect of the genteel woman. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 153. 57 Robert May. The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art &Mystery of Cookery (London, 1685, p. 8.

27

in Partridge’s, Plat’s, and Markham’s cookbooks. In the

last one there is a whole instruction about how to

display dishes for a banquet in which ‘marchpanes have

the first place, the middle place, and the last place’,

surrounded by ‘preserved fruits, pastes, wet suckets,

dried suckets, marmalades, comfits of all kinds, apples

and pears, oranges and lemons sliced, and wafer

cakes’.58 In Plat’s cookbook it is recommended that for

every two pounds of almonds the same weight of finely

beaten sugar may be added to make marchpane.59 Like the

preparation of medicines, the whole organization of the

aristocratic banquets was also considered a lady’s

responsibility.60

Although the early cookbooks were written by men and

were treated by the rest of Europe as a masculine

affair, in England they were soon dedicated to or

addressed to women.61 In Hugh Plat’s cookbook of 1602,

as seen in the beginning of this dissertation, this

kind of dedication is done in the form of an

introductory courteous poem which says ‘Of Sweetes the

Sweetest I will now commend, / To Sweetest creatures

that the earth doth beare: / These are the Saints to

whome I sacrifice / Preserves and conserves both of

58 Markham, The English Housewife (London, 1615), p. 121. As an explanation, sucket is the same of conserve or sweetmeat. 59 Plat, Delightes for Ladies, recipe 18.60 See Markham’s comment on the banquet preparation in which he does ‘only speak’ in his book to housewives. Therefore, women may be considered, according to him, the main executioners in the art of banqueting. Markham, The English Housewife, p. 121. 61 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 171.

28

plum and peare’.62 On the other hand, Robert May

writing decades later and claiming years of experience

among ‘noble peers’ in France still dedicates his work

à la française ‘To all honest well intending Men of our

Profession’.63 May’s introduction is written in a

pretentious language which intends to address his

cookery art to the aristocratic sort, whilst cookbooks

were already being used by the middle classes with

pretentions to rising in society.64 Early cookbooks

were also important for the maintenance of national

identity, since they were one of the largest printed

books in vernacular language.65 Probably due to their

popularity they became more than a compilation of food

recipes, being transformed into domestic manuals to

teach the new middle classes table manners for the

rituals of food consumption.66 In the case of Markham’s

The English Housewife it is possible to find evidence of a

kind of national consciousness of the domestic role

that should be played by women. Whilst the main

attributes desired in them are cooking well and looking

after the family’s health,67 the perfect English

housewife should also have, among moral qualities,

skills to grow herbs, vegetables and fruits, making

62 Plat, Delightes for Ladies, introduction.63 May, The Accomplisht, introduction. 64 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 171.65 Ibid, p. 170.66 Smith, Respectability, p. 264.67 Markham says that of all other activities cookery is ‘the first and most principal [...] together with all the secrets belonging to the same, because it is a duty really belonging to a woman’, in Markham, The English Housewife, p. 60.

29

butter and cheese, preparing cloths for sewing,

distilling and perfuming, malting, brewing, curing

wines, baking, and so on.68 At this point it is

necessary to ask if contemporary women, even with the

patriotic good will of following all these

instructions, could have enough time to develop any

literacy skill to be able to read the complex early

cookbooks by themselves. Considering that at least a

few of them possibly could, developing enough knowledge

to master all those skills at the same time, then

cookbooks, as suggested by Kim Hall, ‘articulated the

practices that defined the English home and the woman’s

place in it’.69

Although dealing with cookery has been a woman’s

activity in all societies, in Britain the use of

cookbooks by women had been in practice since the Early

Modern age, considering specific dedications like

Plat’s Delightes for Ladies. Other authors like Partridge

and Markham, on the other hand, despite not exactly

dedicating their books to women but rather addressing

to them, admitted in their introductions that the

manuscripts for the content of their cookbooks came

indeed from female hands. Partridge refers to his

original source as from ‘a certayne Gentlewoman [...]

my dere and special frende’, whilst Markham says that

68 Until the seventeenth century even upper class women performed a great deal of physical labour. This situation, however, changed on the run of the next century. Smith, Respectability, p. 177.69 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 184.

30

‘It was a manuscript which many years ago belonged to

an honourable Countess’. Until the end of the

seventeenth century it was unusual that respectable

women involved themselves in public activities other

than those related to their domestic duties. It was

acceptable that they occupied certain functions such as

private teachers, governess, domestic services, nurses,

or that they distributed medicines for charitable

purposes, but the world of publication was practically

a male monopoly.70 The publication of cookbooks in

England, however, was soon connected to domesticity,

and therefore considered consistent with the women’s

domestic duty. From revealing the origin of the

manuscripts, even if from an ‘[un]certain gentlewoman’,

cookbooks did start being published during the

eighteenth century as a woman’s work, becoming, like

The Complete Housewife by Elizabeth Smith and The Art of Cookery

Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, best sellers of their

time. Despite the fact that women were already accepted

and even famous as the proper authors of cookbooks, the

same did not occur with the revelation of their names.

In 1747, for example, the authorship of Hannah Glasse’s

cookbook was referred to as ‘By a Lady’. In the next

decade, for the publication of Elizabeth Smith’s work

an androgynous name ‘E. Smith’ was chosen. At the end

of the century, however, Elizabeth Price no longer

found troubles with signing her cookery art with her

70 For the public roles played by respectable women before the eighteenth century, see Smith, Respectability, p. 178.

31

own first name.71 Apart from the contemporary decencies

around female authorship, what makes these cookbooks

revolutionary for the time is the way they are

presented to the public, no longer pretending to serve

the aristocracy. They rather started to be advertised,

as in Glasse and Price’s cookbook titles, as something

‘plain and easy’. In their direct and short prefaces

Price promises to offer ‘a practical confectionary

cooking instruction for young and inexperienced

ladies’72, whilst Glasse tries to enlarge her public

even more by offering her work to the ‘lower sort’, to

the ‘ignorant [...], who can but read’.73 Elizabeth

Smith, although still directing her writing to the

‘genteel and noble table’, promises, like Price and

Glasse, to give practical recipes adequate to the

‘English palates’.74

Comparing the early cookbooks to the ones written by

women it is possible to also realise a considerable

change in the use of sugar. Towards the end of the

century, with the publication of The Complete Confectioner

by Elizabeth Price, the main innovation is that a

cookbook is now entirely dedicated to the confection of

71 There are doubts about the exact year of Price’s publication sincethe fax-simile of the first page is not dated, but it has been suggested 1785 in the A. Hogg edition.72 Price, The Complete Confectioner, introduction.73 Glasse, The Art of Cookery, introduction.74 With a longer and more elaborated introduction, Eliza Smith attacks the French fashion in the cookery art as an impracticable aristocratic taste. She also accuses the previous (male) authors of hiding their best recipes from the public. Eliza Smith, The Complete Housewife, p. 4.

32

sweets.75 Sugar was transformed then into a central

ingredient of an array of products such as the

confection of biscuits, cakes, cheesecakes, pastries,

tarts, jellies, creams, syllabubs, sugar candies, not

to mention the pioneering Mrs. Glasse’s ice cream.76

All these new delicacies based on sugar came to

complete the tables in the celebration of new rituals

around the consumption of food. Just to have an idea

about the complexity lying behind such a product, by

reading an eighteenth century cookbook one can find a

variety of names to qualify sugar: sugar-loaf,

clarified, refined, best refined, double-refined,

single refined, fine double-refined, muscovado (or

muskadine), moist, white, coarse, brown, thin, fresh,

and so on. Derivatives from sugar were also products

like treacle, molasses, and syrup, which are constantly

recommended in the recipes. Although the content of all

these ladies’ cookbooks is absolutely loaded with

sugar, there is now a better definition between savoury

and sweet dishes; but, as observed in Glasse’s final

appendix for the order of dishes through the year,

sweets still can be found both in the second and the

third courses, surrounded by savoury dishes.77 A

75 Although Price’s cookbook still presents a recipe for the preparation of marchpane, Glasse and Smith no longer trouble themselves with the display of this old aristocratic symbol. 76 Glasse, The Art of Cookery, p. 231. A curious detail is that despite the current opposition during the eighteenth century to the use of French styles and terminologies in the English cookery, Mrs. Glasse’s own name has the same pronunciation of the French word for ice cream (glace). 77 Ibid, appendix.

33

complete separation between the distinct dishes would

only take place at the beginning of the nineteenth

century.78

Based on early cookbooks it is possible to confirm that

a large quantity of sugar was recommended for recipes

during the eighteenth century and that the involvement

of women with this commodity was a matter of fact; but,

it is still necessary to question the percentage of

women in Britain really able to read cookbooks during

this time. The origins of the manuscripts used by

Partridge and Markham indicate that women engaged in

writing until the seventeenth century belonged indeed

to the upper classes, for they were entitled

‘Gentlewoman’ and ‘honourable Countess’ being,

therefore, women who certainly had access to servants

to execute the domestic work in the household, while

they could dedicate themselves to literary production.

Nevertheless, women from the middle classes did start

to publish cookbooks during the eighteenth century and

considering their feminine public ‘who could but read’

it can be deduced that cookbooks in the women’s hand

played an important role in the absorption of sugar

into hundreds of new recipes. For the majority of

housewives, however, the involvement with sugar may not

have represented such a ‘sweet’ task.79 Very different

78 Elizabeth Ayrton. The Cookery of England (Penguin, 1977), p. 429.79 Vickery has pointed out that a servant employed as a cook-housekeeper received more than 4 times above other maidservants in 1770. Amanda Vickery. The Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 137. It makes from this occupation a not so degrading job for a woman as supposed to

34

from what happens nowadays, sugar was not simply bought

at the supermarket in packages ready for use; it had to

be broken, clarified, and refined before the food

preparation. Despite the immense domestic work behind

‘sweetness’, the involvement of women with sugar had

been interpreted in the past as something superfluous

and sensually easy. The kind of ‘anxious’ male

literature around the connection between women and

sugar is what I intend to analyse in the next chapter.

think.

35

Chapter III – A universal agreement?

After verifying the accumulation of domestic work for

food preparation that lay behind early cookbooks, the

present chapter intends to analyze the kinds of

association between women and sugar among male authors.

As previously seen, until the mid-eighteenth century it

was not usual that women involved themselves in the

world of publication; therefore, cookbooks were

published by men who, at most, dedicated their work to

them or made reference to a ‘certain Gentlewoman’ as

the real source. But, were the original addresses to

women in the early cookbooks a reliable evidence for

women’s literacy, or were these kinds of addresses

somehow just a marketing strategy to sell cookbooks,

whilst the true target was indeed the male reader? To

what extent were women able to note down recipes, the

fruits of their cookery skill? Moreover, what was,

after all, the percentage of women able to read the

cookbooks dedicated to them?

During the sixteenth century the printing of books was

transformed into one of the main industrial activities

of Europe. In England, the break with Rome during the

1530s led the Protestants to seize this invention,

mainly because the reading of the Bible was understood

as the door to individual salvation.80 The printing of 80 Lawrence Stone. ‘Literacy and Education, 1640-1900.’ Past and Present, 42 (1969), pp. 78-9.

36

cookbooks also increased in the period and in

consequence the demand for them. Due to the impact

caused by the printing press the educational level grew

rapidly until 1680; but this process suffered a

slowdown when the elites started to fear that the

poorer classes once literate could aspire to a social

position ‘beyond their station’.81 Education became

then a privilege for the few in Britain. It is

estimated that only around 30 percent of the male

population was indeed able to sign their own names

during the seventeenth century.82 The method to check

the literacy level in a given period of time is based

on the number of individuals who were able to sign

their names on marriage certificates and other

papers.83 This method, however, although considered the

only possible one, finds limitations because it does

not allow recognizing whether people who could write a

signature on a certain occasion of their lives were

really able to read and vice versa. This method also

reveals that the level of literacy actually varied,

depending on factors such as gender, social group,

geography, and time. Thereby, while 70 percent of the

male population was illiterate between 1580 and 1700,

this number increases to 89 percent among women;84 the 81 Ibid, p. 136, p. 80. 82 David Cressy. ‘Levels of illiteracy in England, 1530-1730.’ The Historical Journal, 20, 1 (1977), p. 4.83 To confirm the methodology for the measurement of literacy levels, see both Stone, ‘Literacy’, p. 98; and Cressy, ‘Levels’, p. 2, 84 This percentage refers to Norwich; this situation, however, was different in London, where around 50 percent of women were literate

37

same period in which Partridge, Plat, and Markham

published their cookbooks with specific dedication or

references to women in them. These books were,

therefore, dedicated to only 11 percent of the feminine

population in the country; if, after all, women who

could sign their names were really able to follow the

instructions for the preparation of food.

Another relevant question is: even being able to read

to an extent, would women find the necessary animus to

decipher the complex contemporary cookbooks after a

hard day of so many domestic duties that were supposed

to be carried out by them?85 Perhaps yes, but certainly

only a few of them. Just as literacy was considered

‘inappropriate’ for the male lower class, reading may

also have been considered a superfluous activity for a

woman during the seventeenth century. Moreover, one

single member in the family or community able to read

could have been enough to transmit a certain message.

An interesting segment in Lawrence Stone’s ‘Literacy

and Education’ may suggest that women (children and

poorer men) were most probably morally ‘flocked’ by the

local authorities during this time:

during the second half of seventeenth century. Cressy, ‘Levels of illiteracy’, pp. 5-9. Among male population belonging to the middle class, the percentage of literacy increases to 80 percent during theeighteenth century. Stone ‘Literacy and education’, p. 109. But, unfortunately, there is no estimate for the level of literacy among middle class women.85 An evidence of the complexity in the early cookbook’s contents is that all the later publications by women writers analyzed in the present study promise easier and more practical instructions.

38

The slowing up of the growth of literacy in England after

1670 allowed the parson and the squire to re-establish

their predominant role in the village as the source of

ideological, religious, and social ideas, and so helped

to ensure domestic peace for about a century.86

Women with literacy skills in both reading and writing

were a rarity during Early Modern Britain; they were at

the most ‘passive literate’ creatures able to read but

not to write.87 For the majority of people during the

Early Modern Age, not only for women, writing was not a

current activity and a proof of this is that even at

the beginning of the eighteenth century schools taught

only reading, not writing. The Sunday School Tract of

1806, for example, stated that ‘the learning we are to

communicate is only intended to enable you to read the

scriptures and to see that it is the will of God that

you should be content with your situation’.88 In spite

of a state in which only around 10 percent of women

were able to sign their names during the whole Early

Modern Age, after the mid-eighteenth century the level

of education in Britain started to increase and in the

case of women the evidence like the cookbooks written

and published by them, as seen in the previous chapter,

testify that the level of female literacy actually

increased. It also suggests that women’s education

started to be spread among other classes and that

86 Stone, ‘Literacy’, p. 136.87 Cressy, ‘Levels’, p. 9, p. 2.88 Stone, ‘Literacy’, p. 92.

39

writing was no longer a privilege reserved for women

belonging to the elites.

Male perception of the involvement of women with sugar

in Early Modern literature was not homogenous. As shown

in the introduction of this dissertation, the Vindication

of Sugars written by Dr. Slare in 1715 chose women as the

patronesses of sugar in recognition of their experience

with such a product. During the same period of time,

however, the consideration to the culinary

inventiveness could give support to the French style,

discrediting women’s potentiality for innovation. Thus,

a contemporary writer says about the invention of

puddings as follows: ‘Blessed be he who invented

pudding, for it is a Manna that hits the Palates of all

Sortes of People’;89 noting that the use of ‘he’ in the

phrase clearly connects any inventive potential, even

in cookery, to a male characteristic. But, although

certain men could have found themselves reluctant in

accepting women’s potentiality for the creation of

hundreds of new recipes of sweet dishes, other kinds of

association between women and sugar are still detected

from the early seventeenth century, like the case of

Hugh Plat, who transformed women into the ‘sweetest

creatures’.90 From then onwards, the sweetness

originated from sugar cane became synonymous not only 89 M. Misson’s Memoirs (1719), in Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 135.90 Plat, Delightes for Ladies, in the introductory poem.

40

of an attractive and docile woman, but also with nearly

everything pleasurable to the senses. In the Oxford

English Dictionary the first meaning of ‘sweet’ is ‘having

pleasant taste characteristic of sugar’ followed by

others such as ‘highly gratifying or attractive,

amiable, pleasant, charming, delighting’, and so on.91

The idea of the feminine gender loving sweets became so

culturally solidified that it is possible to find in

more recent literature around the British history of

food male assumptions that the ‘afternoon tea soon

became an excuse for the indulgence of a woman’s

naturally sweet tooth’.92 Deeper analysis intending to

show the ‘intimate’ connection between sugar and women

as a ‘universal agreement’ and natural occurrence was

carried out by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in

1913. In Luxury and Capitalism he argues that the

connection of women with sugar was of great importance

in the development of capitalism because the

predominant role played by courtesans during the

Renaissance. Due to the extravagant tastes of these

women for luxury articles, sugar rapidly became a

favourite food, being the case that under their

influence eating times were transformed into refined

and sensual enjoyment throughout European courts.93

91 Oxford English Reference Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2003).92 Morton Shand. A Book of Food (Jonathan Cape, London, 1927), p. 42.93 Sombart also makes reference to the English aristocratic banquets during the sixteenth century, which were not complete without a variety of sweets such as jellies, marmalades, sweetmeats, and candies. Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, p. 98-100.

41

Although finer cookery and the incorporation of exotic

tastes into new recipes were important in the early

cookbooks, the construction of a culture centred on the

consumption of luxury articles, the sensualisation of

tastes, and the access of women to enough literacy to

enable them to read cookbooks, may be understood as not

consistent with the reality experienced by the majority

of women in the country during the Early Modern age.

Nevertheless, the aristocratic culture based on the

consumption of expensive imported novelties like sugar

and spices, which were associated with pleasure and

sensuality during early modernity, was already spread

among the middle classes by the beginning of the

eighteenth century with an even greater range of

colonial commodities, also believed to have

aphrodisiacal effects such as tobacco, tea, coffee, and

chocolate. The elevated dimension in the importation of

these articles started to heat contemporary debates

around the consumption of luxuries. From an economic

perspective, so much importation was seen as dangerous

for the balance of payments; from a moral view point,

also a danger, because the consumption of luxury goods

could lead to excessive sensuality and other vices. A

culture centred in luxury, sensuality, imports, and

women’s preferences may also have been contradictory to

the emergence of the Protestant ideals which took place

in the same period of time. The connection between

luxury and vices, however, would not last for too long

42

since it was not in tune with the enthusiasm generated

by the high profits from this commerce. The elites

connected to the overseas trades soon ‘created an

organized and powerful force interested in building

demand for goods such as exotic foods’.94 Thus, from

the beginning of the eighteenth century many writers

started to defend the idea that the free trade of

luxury was at best a necessary evil. In 1714 Mandeville

assumed that ‘Private Vices’ gave ‘Public Benefits’,

bringing wealth to the nation and employment for

many;95 he also argued that the kind of Spartan

frugality and other ascetic virtues preached by the

Puritans were indeed the true enemy of national

prosperity.96 For Adam Smith, for example, money alone

constituted wealth and for this reason he condemned

import prohibitions, high duties and other commercial

restraints, demolishing with this the arguments in

favour of the balance of payments.97 The change in the

way luxury was seen and the new strategies toward the 94 Smith, Respectability, p. 71; Dr. Slare, for example, most probably being somehow benefited for his defence of sugar, declares that it is good for the cure of many maladies. Hisdefence, in the end, takes an exaggerated proportion with the affirmation that his own grandfather had ‘In his Eightysecond Year [...] a new Set of young Teeth quite round’ because ‘all his life [he] loved sugar’. Slare, Vindication to Sugars, p. 61 95 N. Cox. ‘Beggary of the nation: moral, economic and political attitudes to the retail sector in the early modern period’. In John Benson and L. Ugolini (eds.). A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (London, I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 29.96 Bernard Mandeville. The Fable of the Bees (Penguin, 1989 – first edition of 1714), introduction by Phillip Harth, p. 21.97 Cox, ‘Beggary’, pp. 35-6.

43

consumption of luxuries benefited the emergence of an

even larger transatlantic trade and subsequent decrease

in prices, which made luxuries something appealing to

the middle classes’ pockets and aspirations.

A new moral discourse to induce people to buy into

pleasurable fantasies was created to accommodate luxury

to the new necessities of the middle classes. The

fantasy element in the context of luxury was the

fascination with exotic products, which became

desirable exactly because they came from distant lands,

outside the European norms.98 In an elucidating study,

Collin Campbell traces the link between consumption and

romanticism as a phenomenon belonging to the Early

Modern era.99 He argues that romanticism served to

facilitate the emergence of modern consumer behaviour

during the late eighteenth century and wonders how it

was possible that the middle classes in Britain

embraced both the Protestant and the consumption ethics

at the same time. The pursuit of pleasure and sensual

indulgence by consumers immersed in a puritanical ethic

is seen then as a contradictory problem to be solved.

The answer found by Campbell is that the middle classes

were romantics; they gave meaning to things, creating a

delusional enjoyment in the purchase of luxury goods

and regarded taste as a sign of moral and spiritual

worth. Pleasure was taken into the sentimental

98 Smith, Respectability, p. 7499 Colin Campbell. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, (Blackwell, 1987), p. 7.

44

‘beautifulness’, for people had to be convinced that

they were morally good and that they belonged to a

moral elite.100 In the Puritan ethic of the middle

classes women were also identified with romantic

values, being idealized in terms of emotional

sensitivity, rather than taken as rational creatures.101

In this sense, in the context of the connections

between women and sugar during early modernity, sugar

could have become more ‘beautiful’ because through the

hands of the idealized woman it was possible to remove

all the sins and guilt that lay behind such a

commodity. Pleasure and desire in the Protestant ethic

could also have been sublimated, being achieved through

other kinds of ‘sensual’ experiences, like the

pleasurable gratification of a hot and sweetened cup of

tea, served with ‘french biskets’ sprinkled with the

best double refined sugar.102

New tastes like the ingestion of beverages from abroad,

such as tea, coffee and chocolate, all much sweetened

with sugar, became the object of curiosity for the

emerging middle classes. From the mid-seventeenth

century, coffeehouses started to be fashionable places

for male discussions about business, politics,

philosophy, and science, where, for a cup of coffee,

one could have the opportunity to congregate with other

100 Ibid, pp. 203-15.101 Ibid, p. 225.102 Plat’s recipe: ‘To make bisket bread, otherwise called french bisket’. Plat, Delightes for Ladies, recipe 19.

45

people for debates or simply read and/or listen to the

current news. The ingestion of non alcoholic drinks in

the coffeehouses led discussions to be distinguished by

a more rational tone,103 making of these places centres

of popular learning; and because for only one penny one

could have a coffee and converse, coffeehouses were

often called Penny Universities.104 With the boom of the

printing press, the circulation of newspapers and

pamphlets considerably increased,105 probably to supply

the demand necessary to feed a public culture around

‘rational discussions’; and because women were taken as

less rational and more sentimental, they were

discouraged from frequenting public places such as

coffeehouses. Also, they were not considered equipped

with enough education or the faculty of rationality to

take part in the discussions led by men.106 Now, imagine

Dr. Slare in a coffeehouse seriously arguing about the

benefits of sugar for children, according to his last

experiences with mother’s milk:

This gave me an Opportunity to observe much difference

in the Degrees of Sweetness of several Milks [which are]

of a fine delicate sweet Taste [and] sweeter than the

best Cows Milks [...] I have a strong and home Argument

103 For a discussion about coffeehouses as the places for the development of ‘rational masculinity’ in England, see Smith, Respectability, pp. 139-69.104 Brian Cowan. Social life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005), p. 99.105 More than 22.000 new pamphlets and newspapers were published in Britain only between 1640 and 1660. Stone, ‘Literacy and Education’, p. 100.106 Smith, Respectability, p. 157.

46

to recommend the Use of Sugar [added in the cow’s milk]

to Infants, of which to defraud them is a very cruel

Thing, if not a crying Sin.107

Considering that coffeehouses were places for rational

discussions between men, it would not be wrong to

deduce that this kind of ‘scientific’ content could

also have taken place in such public spaces, full of

imported beverages, tobacco, and newspapers.108

Meanwhile, the presence of women was understood as a

factor of distraction, for they could disturb the

seriousness of the environment and turn the

conversation into superficial or at best sentimental

lines. Indeed, not only were women seen as an

inconvenience towards the rational conversations in the

public sphere, but also poor men. Therefore, from the

second half of eighteenth century, the male elite

tended to abandon the public coffeehouses and migrate

to private clubs.109

At the end of the eighteenth century, with the ever

increasing publication of newspapers, men from the

107 Slare, Vindication of Sugars (1715), pp. 8-9.108 The fashionable taste for sweeten wines also coincides with the golden age of coffeehouses, becoming one of the major uses of sugar in Europe during the seventeenth century. Smith, Respectability, p. 100. Another popular alcoholic drink derived from sugar during the eighteenth century was rum punch, which also became fashion for male socialising. Shammas, ‘Changes in English consumption’, p. 183; It may put in doubt Smith’s argument in defence of his‘rational masculinity’ and coffeehouses as places that served only non-alcoholic drinks for the running of ‘rational discussions’. 109 Smith, Respectability, p. 150.

47

working class also started to become ‘news-hungry’

literates 110 and avid frequenters of the coffeehouse

culture; and considering the absence of women in this

culture – either because their entry was ‘not

recommended’ or because they were indeed short in time

with so much domestic work to do – it can be assumed

that public spaces formed only by males could have

facilitated anxious fantasies around the consumption of

luxuries and the involvement of women with them. After

all, they were not present to give their own opinions

in the discussions concerning to them and with this to

contribute for the real seriousness of public debates.

It was only after 1780 that women were ‘invited’ to

debate in public assembly rooms,111 but even then their

oratories could be observed as ‘disgusting’. A

contemporary newspaper published the following comment

about women’s speech in assemblies: ‘for what Women

[...] could stand up in an Assembly of a thousand of

Persons, and hazard their Thoughts and Language on

Subjects which they are supposed never to have studied

[...]? [...] Is there a Man on Earth who [...] would

not be shocked to find his Sister, Daughter or Wife in

this garrulous Society?’112

The way that the involvement of women with sugar was

treated in male literature, as in some of the examples

110 Stone, ‘Literacy and Education’, p. 85. 111 Donna Andrew. ‘Popular culture and public debate: London1780’, The Historical Journal, 39, 2 (1996), p. 410.112 Ibid, p. 421.

48

demonstrated in the present study, it is not a surprise

to realize that the tradition of the sweet women as a

natural occurrence ended up in creating one of the best

successful merchandising of the twentieth century,

which became both sugar and woman. Just as sugar was an

immensely profitable commodity during the Early Modern

age, the sensual icon Marilyn Monroe also achieved huge

fame playing a character named nothing less than Sugar

Kane.113 For a more hodiernal example of the traditional

link between femininity and the sensuality of eating

habits, however, it is enough to look around and

visualize the British cookbook writer and television

presenter Nigella Lawson, who, with her sensual manner

of dealing with cookery has sold millions of cookbooks

worldwide. Perhaps as a marketing strategy that keeps

inducing people to buy into pleasurable fantasies, like

the one used by Hugh Plat long time ago, she still

connects cookery with pleasure, turning her kitchen

into the ‘interior garden of sensual delights’.114

The phenomenon of the sweetification of women in Early

Modern literature coincided with the emergence of the

middle class and its aspirations, along with the

deterioration of women’s institutional power. Although

women really lacked many social advantages, the ideology

113 Marilyn Monroe stared as Sugar Kane in the film Some like itHot in 1959.114 Nigella Lawson. ‘Nigella’s pleasure principle’, You Magazine, Mail on Sunday supplement, 29/08/2010.

49

of a sensual and docile woman should rather be seen as a

construction based on male fantasies, not as a natural

occurrence as so confidently assumed by certain authors.

According to Amanda Vickery, this kind of anxiety just

reveals the male concerns with women’s professional

activities, for records show that they were already

engaged in many trades and greatly employed in small

domestic industries during the eighteenth century.115 The

connection between femininity and sweetness may not be

understood as a ‘universal agreement’ even in the context

of luxury, since only a tiny percentage of women had the

circumstances to be framed in the fantastic world of

luxury consumption, far from representing the whole

cultural reality. The majority of women in Britain during

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to cope with

heavier domestic work, and a proof of this is that even a

young daughter of a rich merchant was taught cooking,

preserving, sewing, edible planting, preparing medicines

and so on.116 The estimate showing around 90 percent of

women as illiterate people during the early modern period

can also be imprecise if it is considered that wives-to-

be could have avoided displaying themselves as literate

beings during the wedding ceremony, since the husband’s

signature was to represent the couple from that moment

onward. This method also does not make mention of

spinsters, who represented around 20 percent of the

115 Vickery. ‘Golden age’, pp. 404-7.116 Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 156.

50

female population during the mid-eighteenth century.117 If

a number of these unmarried women were literate, perhaps

developing such a skill to improve their chances of

employability, then a much higher percent of the female

population in the country could have been formed by

readers able to deal with cookbooks; and if with the

ability to also write, ready to communicate their

culinary knowledge through the noting down of recipes,

which were primarily the real sources of the cookbooks

published by men.

Chapter IV – Home, sweet home

Contradicting the notion of a sweet sensualised

womanhood, my aim with this last chapter is to show the

domestic environment in which the involvement of women

with sugar took place during the Early Modern period.

Although most women were ‘confined’ in the household,

they still participated in the growth of the Atlantic

economy through the consumption of colonial goods such

as sugar; and because they probably played an important

role in the domestic consumer choice – at least for the

choice of the smallest items in the household like

ingredients for cooking – home demand can be seen as

117 For the life of single women during the eighteenth century England, see Vickery. Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England (Yale Press University, 2009), p. 208.

51

relevant to the economic development.118 Dealing with

sugar at home was not, however, an easy task, since it

depended upon sophisticated skills from the beginning

of its process.

In order to maximize domestic profits, the British

government used a system of punitive taxes to make it

impossible for its colonial producers to refine their

own sugar until the mid-nineteenth century. Instead of

supplying the metropolis with sugarloaf, which was a

more finished state of sugar, a brown raw material

called muscovado was shipped from the colonies. The

extraction of sugar from a vegetable was already

considered a technical achievement, but once in the

metropolis, the process of refining the rough colonial

product represented a symbol of the modern and

industrial,119 for this process evoked ‘refinement’,

which was the heart of British culture at a time when

sugar represented the most profitable commodity.

According to an interesting analysis on the culture of

refinement with a link between Britain and its

colonies, Kay Kriz argues that it became commonplace

that colonies were perceived as less refined and

civilized than the imperial centre because they were

where the raw material was extracted by slave labour,

whilst the metropolis was where it was refined and

118 Remembering that at that time a wife had no financial independence, being that all proprieties and accounts were in the husband’s name. For a freedom in consumer choice, I guess, a woman would strongly depend on her husband’s ‘benevolence’. 119 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, pp. 16-29.

52

consumed.120 Notwithstanding, the process of refining,

necessary to turn sugar cane into a civilized product,

became indeed one of woman’s culinary skills.121 In

Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, for example, there is a recipe

to teach how to cover seeds, fruits and spices with

sugar. Through the sequence of this recipe Plat

instructs the reader to ‘choose the whitest and hardest

sugar, and then you need not to clarifie it, but beate

it into fine powder’.122 This recipe suggests that

refining sugar was a domestic job as well as the

initial process for the preparation of sweets; and

taking into account that Plat’s cookbook is dedicated

to women, it can be deduced that it was a skill that

they should possess. Another of his recipes may also

suggest his concerns with the economy of the household,

since the price of muscovado is given: ‘such muske

sugar is sold for two shillings the pound’ (perhaps to

serve as comparison with the price of common sugar).123

Therefore, not only the refining of sugar was taught in

the early cookbooks, but also how to clarify it,

turning it from a brownish colour into a writer one.

Although the oldest cookbooks do not display recipes

for clarifying, this process can be found later in the

mid-eighteenth century cookbooks, which also indicates

120 Kay Dian Kriz. Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (Yale University Press, 2008), p. 4.121 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 180.122 With ‘whitest and hardest’ Plat is probably referring to the sugarloaf. Plat, Delightes, for Ladies, recipe 54. 123 Ibid, recipe 2.

53

concerns with domestic economy. Elizabeth Price gives a

detailed recipe of how to master this skill:

Put the white of an egg into your preserving pan, with

about four quarts of water, and beat it up into a froth

with a whisk, then put it twelve pounds of sugar; mix

them together, and as soon as it boils, put in a little

cold water four or five times, till the scum appears

thick on the top; then take it off the fire, and let it

settle, then take off the scum, and pass it through your

straming-bag. If the sugar doth not appear very fine, you

must boil it again before you strain it, otherwise in

boiling it to a height, it will rise over the pan.124

This recipe suggests that although refined and white

sugars were found in the market place, preparing it at

home could have still represented an alternative way to

master the confectionary art.125

Average retail price of white sugar and muscovado in

England, in pence per lb:126

Decades White

sugar

Muscovad

o

differen

ce

%

1583-1592 17.10 13.84 3.26 19.07

124 Price, The Complete Confectioner, p. 13; Eliza Smith also displays a recipe ‘to clear sugar’. Smith, The Compleat Housewife, p. 203. 125 And besides, if the intention was to make small business with themaking of sweets, then a woman could maximize her profits. It contradicts to a certain extent the assumption made by Shammas that brown sugar was bought by those who were ‘unable to afford white sugar’. Shammas, ‘Changes in consumption’, p. 182.126 Based on the accounts and tables supplied by Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, p. 528.

54

1593-1602 19.10 15.67 3.43 17.961603-1612 20.27 14.20 6.07 29.951613-1622 17.94 13.09 4.85 27.041623-1632 19.14 13.80 5.34 27.901633-1642 21.14 13.33 7.81 36.951643-1652 19.33 14.35 4.98 25.771653-1662 12.50 7.36 5.14 41.121663-1672 10.80 9.00 1.80 16.671683-1692 9.50 6.75 2.75 28.951693-1702 12.76 7.16 5.60 43.891583-1702 16.325 11.686 4.639 28.66

Even with a great variation in price throughout the

Early Modern period, the average difference between

muscovado and white sugar during the seventeenth century

was around 28 percent. This means that, in practice,

the value of white sugar was not kept much above the

original raw material, as observed in the table above.

However, because the whiter, more beautiful,

industrial, and modern sugar may have been

considered,127 it became a custom among rich people to

give a loaf of refined and clarified sugar as a gift

during the seventeenth century.128

127 Not exactly a technical achievement to imitate the whiteness of Gentlewomen’s skin, like suggested by Midgley in Feminism and Empire, p. 46; otherwise it would contradict the contemporary taste for other colonial products with brownish colouration such as chocolate,coffee, and even tea.128 Roger, J. T. History of Agriculture and Prices in England (Oxford, 1866), in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 160. It would require more research to know whether the making of sugarloaves was alternatively also a domestic industry.

55

When the finest and whitest sugar was ready, ladies

could occupy themselves in the confectionary art which

involved the transformation of sugar into delicacies.

During the sixteenth century aristocratic women were

engaged in the creation of banquets, which consisted of

elaborate rituals around the preparation of sweets. The

word ‘banquet’ designated the serving after the meal,

when decorative sugar moulds called marchpane were

served along with other sweets, such as preserved

fruits (sweetmeats) and marmalades.129 The banquet

represented a time for entertainment and rituals for

the display of status; and, indeed, both instructions

for the whole presentation and recipes for the making

of marchpanes can be found in all the early cookbooks

analyzed in this study. 130 The presence of these

instructions in early material may indicate, on the

other hand, that the aristocratic ritual of banqueting

had probably already spread toward other social classes

from the beginning of the seventeenth century, once

cookbooks were already at this point mass produced

editions, much beyond the number of aristocratic people

in the country.131 Thus, it can be assumed that the

creation of banquets were attached not only to

aristocratic ladies during the seventeenth century but

also to women from the middle classes; and that, 129 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces’, p. 172.130 See the instructions for the banquet preparation given by Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, in the p. 16 of this essay.131 Vickery reminds that peerage was indeed very rare, with 267 families by 1800, which represented only a fraction of the whole society. Vickery, ‘Golden age’, p. 395.

56

despite their social or economic circumstances, they

were physically involved in the preparation of social

events around eating times, as very clearly

demonstrated by Markham in his instructions about how

to prepare a banquet.132 Therefore, the confection of

sweets was since the Early Modern period a

gentlewoman’s art which provided her with the

opportunity for social recognition. And since the

preparation of marchpanes also involved a degree of

literary skills, as pointed out by Kim Hall, the

elaboration of banquets was also a ‘venue for artistic

self-expression’.133 Indeed, in Plat ‘s Delightes for Ladies

there is a recipe ‘To make an excellent Marchpane

paste, to print off in molds for banquets’, but then,

he is not really worried about instructing ladies in

the printing process. He rather pens comments about a

certain ‘countrie Gentlewoman’ who fails in the

preparation of her marchpane, making the recipe to

‘taste too much sugar, and too little of the almonds’;

and once more he calls attention to the cheapest way

of achieving good results in the kitchen, ‘the garble

of almonds will make a cheap paste’.134

With the economic growth of the middle classes ways of

displaying ‘politeness’ and ‘civility’ became important

in Britain, since for non aristocratic people the

132 Markham, The English Housewife, p. 121. See page 14 of this dissertation. 133 Hall, ‘Culinary spaces, p. 176.134 Plat, Delightes for Ladies, recipe 12.

57

adoption of conventions of polite behaviour was a

necessary condition to escalate in society. In

addition, practising good taste through the consumption

of fashionable overseas products was also a way to

display gentility. As shown in the previous chapter,

during the seventeenth century coffeehouses became the

right spaces for male congregation and the ostentation

of civility through ‘rational conversation’.135 During

this time coffee was consumed ten times more than tea,

and it was only at the beginning of the eighteenth

century that tea started to be a preferred drink in the

country. 136 According to Smith, however, this change

resulted as a matter of price rather than taste.137 Not

much tea was consumed because its price was unstable

and high during the seventeenth century, but when tea

smuggling into Britain became a big business, then it

became more affordable, inviting people to change

habits. 138 Until the beginning of the eighteenth

century, however, tea was drunk without sugar, in the

Chinese way, and it was only by the 1730s that drinking

sweetened tea became spread throughout the upper and

middle classes in Britain.139 Adding sugar to the tea

(and to other colonial beverages) made the consumption

135 Smith, Respectability, pp. 155-9.136 Woodruff D. Smith. ‘Accounting for taste: British coffee consumption in historical perspective’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27:2, 1996, p. 184.137 Ibid, p. 214.138 Woodruff D. Smith. ‘Complications of the commonplace: tea, sugar,and imperialism. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23:2, 1992, pp. 272-5.139 Ibid, p. 264.

58

of sugar increase even more,140 to the point of

transforming the habit of drinking sweetened tea into a

patriotic ritual – for it supported the British Empire,

whilst the consumption of other commodities such as

wine, coffee and chocolate benefited the commercial

rivals.141 Nevertheless, since the consumption of

overseas products represented a bridge towards the

display of gentility, possessing then important social

and cultural meanings, and since both sugar and tea had

become affordable items for the middle classes, teatime

invaded the home, becoming a domestic ritual par

excellence.142

As a domestic event women played a central role in the

tea drinking time and because manners were important

during this ritual, home was understood as the core of

civilized behaviour. Consequently, woman and sugar in

the context of the tea ritual also represented the

maintenance of civilization, particularly if it is

taken into account that through the roles of mothers

and educators as well as their constant presence, it

became the women’s responsibility to keep the household

‘civilized’. 143 With the improvement of manners the

barbaric habit of spitting whilst at table, for

example, started not to be accepted.144 The practice of 140 Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 244.141 Smith, ‘Complications’, p. 277.142 However, it was only during the nineteenth century that working class had access to tea. Smith, Respectability, p. 173.143 For ‘domestic femininity’ and the development of the ritual of tea drinking, see Smith, Respectability, pp. 172-187.144 Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 258.

59

good manners led the tea table to become the arena not

only for the consumption of sweetened tea and biskets

covered with the best fine sugar, but also an excellent

opportunity to display ‘good taste’ through the

acquisition of refined goods from abroad. The new

commodities around teatime – which consisted of

mahogany tables and chairs, china tea-services, silver

tea-trays, sugar caddies, sugar tongs, tea-spoons, tea-

pots – were considered luxuries and desired items

because, like sugar and tea, they came from distant

lands, inciting the imagination. At the end of the

eighteenth century, as England started to exchange the

importation of these items for locally produced

alternatives it occurred an innovation of production

based on cheaper materials, which made from the display

of good taste something affordable to the remaining

social classes in the country.145 The importation of

sugar and tea, on the other hand, continued even after,

but also cheaper and cheaper.

As shown in this chapter, the involvement of women with

sugar – from the physically demanding initial process

of its refining and clarifying, through to the

gentlewoman’s artistic confection of marchpanes and

sweetmeats for the banquets, to the middle class’

socialization around the family’s tea table – makes it

clear to me that the domestic environment in which

145 Maxine Berg. ‘From imitation to innovation: creating commodities in eighteenth century Britain’. Economic History Review, LV, 1 (2002), pp. 1-30.

60

women were immersed during the Early Modern era was not

of less importance for the economic development of the

country than the male ‘rational discussions’ in public

spaces such as the coffeehouses, at least not in the

context of the growth in the consumption of sugar, this

peculiar commodity, which became the ‘favoured child of

capitalism’.146

Conclusion

146 Fernando Ortiz. Cuban Counterpoint (New York, Knopf, 1947), pp. 267-82; in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 214.

61

By the early eighteenth century British society had

already been shaped by new patterns of consumption and

new rituals of sociability around the use of sugar.

There was at the time a euphoric celebration of wealth

and enthusiasm with the colonial commerce which was

bringing progress, culture and civilization to the

country – and it was done without much perception of

what lay behind the sweetness on the tea tables. On the

contrary, the domestic ritual of tea drinking was

linked with female morality, respectability,

refinement, and polite conversation. However, when the

consumption of sugar became generalized to all social

classes, as the eighteenth century came to an end,

ladies’ tea tables became the arena for the criticism

of this kind of consumerism. Concerned with its moral

implications, upper class women started to promote tea

parties to debate about the boycott of slave-grown

sugar. 147 Recognizing their power of domestic consumer

choice, lower-class women were urged to take part in

the boycott and prevent their families from the

consumption of such an ‘immoral’ product. It is

calculated that around 300,000 people joined in the

movement in 1791.148 The boycott invited women not only

to abstain from sugar, but also to reject the

metaphorical sweetness of women present in male

literature; they started to realize the associations 147 For the involvement of women in the campaigns against the use of slave-grown sugar during the 1790s, see Midgley, ‘Sweetness and power’, in Feminism and Empire, pp. 41-64.148 Midgley, Feminism and Empire, p. 43.

62

between them, sugar, the slavery system, and the ideal

of the docile domestic women. In the Vindication of the Rights

of Women, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft suggested in

1792 that both British women and African slaves were

oppressed in order to ‘sweeten the cup of man’.149

Although women’s writings were classified by

contemporary scholars as belonging to a sentimental

literature, being the subject on slavery assimilated to

pure expression of moral sentiments,150 British women

were already at the end of eighteenth century

publically criticizing the associations of women with

nature and the masculine self-confidence about men’s

rationality over the sweet irrationality of the

feminine gender. In her Vindication, Wollstonecraft urged

that women received a more rational education and that

they were no longer cultivated to ‘being only designed

by sweet attractive grace’, becoming ‘objects of

desire’, for it was to ‘deprive them of souls’.151

Both the growth in the consumption of sugar during the

Early Modern period and the connection between

sweetness and femininity should be understood then as

cultural products. Just as the ever rising consumption

of sugar had an ideological occurrence in the search

for profits, the sweet domesticated woman and the

149 Ibid, p. 42.150 Davies, K. ‘A moral purchase: femininity, commerce and abolition,1788-1792’, in E. Eger at al (eds.), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 136.151 Mary Wollstonecraft. Vindication of the Rights of Women (London, J. Johnson, 1796), p. 33.

63

expectation that they will enjoy sweet things more than

men were literary creations. Assumptions like those of

Frederick Slare, who designated women as the

patronesses of sugar with the intention of promoting

its consumption, or Werner Sombart, who explained the

success of the sugar trade and subsequent development

of capitalism through the ‘intimate’ connection between

sweets and feminine gender, are to be rejected. As

analysed by Collin Campbell, they take nature as a

motivation, whereas motives should be understood as

products constructed by human beings, not given by

nature.152

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Matthew McCormack for his supervision, constructive criticism and advice throughout the composition of this dissertation. I also wish to thank the University of Northampton for providing the facilities for this research; special thanks to the librarian Charlotte152 Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, p. 211.

64

Heppell, who helped me to find many articles and electronic sources. I am immensely grateful to Lidia Douglas, from the department of English for foreign students, for correcting the draft and helping make the reading of the text much smoother. I am particularly indebted to Professor Pedro Paulo de Abreu Funari, from the University of Campinas, Brazil, for generously supplying a confident reference to the University of Northampton to a such ‘ancient’ student like me. I also must acknowledge Leonardo Leite, my son, forhis readiness to always read and make comments on my papers,despite his own busy academic affairs. Last but also first, I must be grateful to Leo Hanlon, my husband, who throughoutthe period I have been engaged in this study listened to my ideas and constantly checked my writings, encouraging me with tender love; I could not have written this dissertationwithout his infinite patience towards me.

65

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