‘Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain’

USD professor Dr. Rebecca Ingram published scholarly work

COLIN MULLANEY / COPY EDITOR / THE USD VISTA

Dr. Rebecca Ingram of the USD Languages, Cultures and Literature Department recently published a scholarly book entitled “Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain,” in which she shares the culmination of her years’ worth of academic research and personal interest in the subjects of gastronomy (food studies), Spanish language and culture, gender studies and politics. On Sept. 28, Ingram presented her completed work for the first time to USD students, faculty and guests at the College of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Center.  

Ingram described the sensation of holding her printed book for the first time.

“Just to hold it in my hands feels really special, and it’s amazing, and it’s shocking at the same time, because it takes so many years of work to produce something like that, and that’s something that would have been impossible without the support of an institution like USD that supports faculty research,” Ingram said. 

In her newly released work, Ingram explores the intersections of gender and social class to understand how food work — often done by working class women — impacted Spanish modernization. Although the role of women in the 20th century was perceived to be solely domestic as the “angel of the house,” Ingram explores the persistent efforts of influential and everyday women to shape national identity and politics through the means available to them at the time, often food work. 

The research that would later culminate as Ingram’s book began as her doctoral dissertation at Duke University, but the seeds of the book were planted even earlier, during her undergraduate years at Emory University. There, she had a powerful experience with independent research and integrating multiple, coalescing fields of study.

“My undergraduate experience is a Spanish major, so we looked at literary and cultural texts in history, and we did that all in Spanish. Then I also did a poli-sci major, so I was always thinking about the intersections between politics and culture and how these kinds of really thorny political tensions show up in literary and cultural texts – even in food texts – which is what I was able to show [in my book].”

After becoming a professor at USD in 2009, Ingram furthered her research into Spanish culinary work and politics during a trip to Barcelona on sabbatical. There, she studied records at the Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison, formerly the Institut de Cultura Popular i Biblioteca de la Dona. 

A few years after her experience at the archives in Barcelona, Ingram decided to utilize all of this prior research for the purposes of a printed book, and she got to work writing a proposal, which was later accepted by Vanderbilt University Press. 

“Probably 2018, I decided, ‘I’ve done all this work. I have all this work I’ve done as part of my dissertation; I’m going to revise it. I really think this makes sense as a book, and it needs to exist as a book in the world,’” Ingram said. 

However, the road to publication had some unexpected turns, not least of which was the global COVID-19 crisis. During lockdown in 2020, Ingram found solace and comfort in her passion project, which she continually focused her energy on, in order to mitigate the stress of the ongoing pandemic.  

“Those first few months of lockdown… the way to kind of just get through those days without being a basket case and super anxious all the time was to really just to focus on what I could do for my students… and also to do for myself,” she said.

Through her dedication to write, Ingram also came into contact with writing groups who could provide a sense of a community in an otherwise deeply solitary and isolated time. 

Initially, Ingram felt alone in her journey and research interests, but her community of writers and friends were able to dialogue, support and critique her work until it was polished and ready to publish. 

“I was participating in Zoom writing groups. There was community… we could, for an hour of our time, put our noses down and really focus on something that was not the pandemic, that was not lockdown, that was not uncertainty,” Ingram said. 

Through all the effort and struggles bringing her ideas into tangible fruition — to share her thoughts with others — Ingram also learned a lot about researching, writing, and communicating to a broader audience. The overall experience has changed both her own approach to research and the advice she gives to other, aspiring scholars and writers.   

“If you touch these projects, even like 15 minutes a day — Monday through Friday — you can advance them little by little, and it really works,” Ingram shared. “You don’t have to do binge writing; you don’t have to cram and make magic happen in a period of two days or two weeks. Working on it very incrementally over a period of time, you can see things to their completion. That’s hard sometimes, but it has been truly transformative.”

In the acknowledgments, Ingram credited her grandmother, who she admires greatly and thanked for the time spent together in the kitchen. The two shared a close relationship, which inspired and invited further interest and questions about the gendered division of labor and influence of food work for Ingram, which was foundational for her research process.   

“One acknowledgment that felt really important for me to make especially with this book and the title ‘Women’s Work’ was my grandmother, who I saw doing lots of work that is ‘women’s work’… the last thing she would have done would have been to identify as a feminist,” Ingram said. “I really wanted to hold that [hands-on] learning and that influence as something that impacted this work and that shaped the way I do feminist scholarship today.”