Celebrating the Anonymous Artists of Domesticity

It is not that Caroline Russom doesn’t admire Nobelist Marie Curie or space pioneer Sally Ride. It’s just that Russom wonders about all the women we’ve never heard of, the ones whose achievements run more to making memorable tapioca pudding than to making headlines.

Especially at this time of year, during Women’s History Month, the Cal State Northridge librarian sees the name of Amelia Earhart or Eleanor Roosevelt and wonders, “Who made their peanut-butter sandwiches? Who enabled them?”

To honor and celebrate all those anonymous women, Russom organized a small but resonant exhibit now in the campus’ Oviatt Library. Called “In Search of Our Mothers’ Kitchens: Women in the Domestic Arts, 1900-2000,” the show features vintage dinnerware, old cookbooks and several of those once popular decorative calendars on linen dish towels.

Russom sees the show as a corrective to the tendency to devalue the unpaid work women do at home. Her view is that what famous women--and famous men, for that matter--have achieved was often accomplished because they stood on the shoulders of a forgotten woman, a woman with a garlic press in one hand, a phone to her ear, a babe on her hip and a toddler at her feet. As Russom puts it: “Those women in the kitchen, our mothers and grandmothers, also do remarkable things, and no one remembers.”

If some object in the show doesn’t move you, you are probably dead. Did any of us not grow up with a set of Blue Willow ware, used to set the table on Thanksgiving and other ceremonial occasions? Here are such potent memory triggers as the glasses that Cheez Whiz once came in that thrifty mothers used for serving juice. Does anyone else still have her well-thumbed copy of 1971’s “The Grub Bag,” a relic of the era when no kitchen lacked a macrame plant hanger and herb referred to more than rosemary.

Russom understands that our best memories are made up of small things, not milestones: citrus reamers, tablecloths worn silky smooth, richly colored Depression glass and free booklets that instructed our grandmothers in “50 Ways of Serving Shredded Wheat.”

Author and domestic philosopher Alexandra Stoddard says the impulse to create beauty out of such unlikely ingredients as spice jars and dishcloths is primal and profound.

“The aesthetic is the ultimate dimension in our life,” says Stoddard, who has filled her own kitchen with copper pots, a 9-foot tree, an original painting of a napkin and napkin ring and such small amenities as swizzle sticks of Murano glass.

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Stoddard, whose 21 published books include “Living a Beautiful Life,” has blue glass bottles on the windowsill that catch the sun. “It’s sort of divine light,” she says, on the phone from her Manhattan kitchen. “It spills in through the cobalt glass. You get these wonderful undulating spots of blue on the kitchen floor or on the cabinets.”

The CSUN show is a belated thank you to all the women who fill their kitchens with warmth and beauty as well as labor-saving appliances. The editorial content of the exhibit is minimal but pointed. Russom quotes Alice Walker’s observation that, for her mother, “there was never a moment for her to sit down undisturbed to unravel her private thoughts, never a time free from interruption--by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children.”

But just as a good cook adds a squirt of lemon to make a sweet dish less cloying, Russom includes some literary vinegar in the show. She quotes Zelda Fitzgerald, who apparently believed the devil invented the eggbeater. “I don’t want to think about pots and pans and kitchens and brooms,” Fitzgerald wrote. “I want to worry about whether my legs will get slick and brown in the summer.”

Russom has a theory that the kitchen we all aspire to is one that exists entirely in our heads. Hers is the kitchen of her childhood home in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx. There, she remembers, she spent “one perfect afternoon” laughing with her parents, as she and her sister had Oreos and milk. The red-and-white-checked napkins that prove the day existed are on display.

Books on the art and science of housekeeping are included in the show. One chilling example is 1954’s “Management in the Home: Happier Living through Saving Time and Energy.” In it, author Lillian Moller Gilbreth, the mother of 12 whose time-managed domestic life is the subject of “Cheaper by the Dozen,” explains how to make two cups of breakfast coffee in a mere 47 steps.

As Russom points out, women were seeking kitchen counsel more than a century ago when they made a bestseller of “The American Women’s Home,” written by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s less famous sister, Catharine. Russom recently bought two copies of a modern example of the genre--Cheryl Mendelson’s “Home Comforts”--for the CSUN library. A surprise bestseller in 1999, the 884-page tome continues to fly out of bookstores into the hands of readers who apparently want to know everything about dust mites, to which Mendelson devotes an entire chapter.

When Russom thinks about the women whose kitchens she honors, she is reminded of a World War I manual for field doctors in her private collection. That book urges the physicians charged with treating battle wounds to “Do it well, do it cheerfully, do it now.”

“Women a lot of the time do it well, do it cheerfully, do it beautifully and do it with love,” Russom says.

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As to her own favorite kitchen item, Russom confesses that she once paid $40 for a set of nature-inspired cookie cutters marketed by Martha Stewart, whom, Russom notes, “we all love and hate.”

She has never used them. “They remain pristine and perfect in their little box,” she says dreamily. “I would have paid any price for them.”

“In Search of Our Mothers’ Kitchens” continues in the Oviatt Library on the CSUN campus, 18111 Nordhoff St. through March 30. For information, call (818) 677-2638.

Spotlight appears each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.