Neither gendered nor a room: the kitchen in central Europe and the masculinization of modernity, 1800-1900

In nineteenth-century central Europe, the “kitchen” was neither necessarily gendered nor a room. Throughout the century, royalty maintained up to seven rooms purposed for cooking, the middling maintained one separate from working and dining areas, while working and rural poor could not maintain their cooking-area separate from the rest of their single-room dwelling. Further, royal kitchens preferentially employed men. The wider social conception of a kitchen as a single gendered room emerged late in the century among the middle class, buttressed by male sexual fantasies and part of a masculinized modernization.