COLLEEN DEBAISE: Hi, I'm Colleen DeBaise.

VICTORIA FLEXNER: And I'm food historian Victoria Flexner.

COLLEEN: Today we're continuing our series about American women in food…

VICTORIA: …whose names you may never have heard of…

COLLEEN: …but who nevertheless made American food what it is today. If you haven't already, check out our previous episodes on MFK Fisher, the great California food writer, and Cecilia Chiang, the San Francisco restaurateur. Today we head down to New Orleans…

VICTORIA: …to talk about one of the best examples of an iconic American woman in food, who has sort of entirely slipped through the cracks of history.

ZELLA PALMER: Lena Richard, I think she is one of the most profound American women in history. There's so much we can learn from Lena Richard.

VICTORIA: That's Zella Palmer. She's the chair and director…

ZELLA: of the Dillard University Ray Charles program in African American material culture here in New Orleans, Louisiana.

VICTORIA: And we talked to her and a few other food experts about the culinary legacy of Lena Richard.

ZELLA: She knew how to make some of the most classic Creole dishes.

COLLEEN: That's right. Lena Richard was a chef of Creole cuisine from New Orleans, famous for her shrimp bisque and spicy chicken gumbo, who not only had a cooking school--

VICTORIA: --and a cookbook--

COLLEEN: --and a few restaurants--

VICTORIA: --and even a frozen food line--

COLLEEN: --she was also one of the first American women to have her own cooking show on TV, and almost certainly the first Black woman to have her own show.

VICTORIA: It started to air on WDSU in New Orleans all the way back in 1949, more than a decade before Julia Child.

COLLEEN: And you know, I think a lot of people probably assume Julia, whose cooking show “The French Chef” first aired on TV in 1963, was in fact the first American woman to have a cooking show.

JULIA CHILD: This is really the stew of stews! Boeuf bourguignon, today on “The French Chef.”

VICTORIA: Yeah, they probably do, but Lena Richard came well before. Sadly, we can't play a clip from Lena's show, because like a lot of live programs from the early, early days of TV, there's just no archive of it. Though legend has it that when she was done with her twice-a-week broadcast, the cameramen would actually push past each other to get to the leftovers!

COLLEEN: You know, it's kind of shocking that she's not more famous, though her life was tragically cut short. She died from a heart attack at the age of 58 when her TV show was only a year old.

VICTORIA: Yeah, and you have to wonder if perhaps we might be more familiar with her today if she'd lived longer or, to be honest, if we lived in a society that celebrated our Black female chefs. Lena was really at the height of her career, breaking new ground, when she passed in 1950. In many ways, she set the standard of the multi-hyphenate food personality that so many chefs and food stars emulate in this space today.

ZELLA: The one thing that I always think about is just how she perfected these recipes, you know, as she had Black women and white women trying to learn how to cook.

COLLEEN: If you go online today, there's actually an ardent group of fans recreating some of her famous recipes.

FAN #1: Welcome back to Lena's 1939 Creole Recipes, where I'm cooking my way through the original “New Orleans Cook Book.”
FAN #2: Today, we're focused on the queen of Creole cooking, Lena Richard.
FAN #3: Today, we are honoring Lena Richard's legacy with a classic New Orleans dish, shrimp creole.

ZELLA: And it's all in her book, her first book, “Lena Richard’s Cook Book,” which was published in 1939.

VICTORIA: The book, which has been reprinted many, many times, is widely recognized as the first Creole cookbook written by an African American.

COLLEEN: So let's talk about one of the recipes in there, Lena's watermelon ice cream dish.

VICTORIA: Yeah, it's one of her most famous signature dishes. When it was presented at the table-- and Lena catered many meals for wealthy white socialites--it looked like a watermelon. But then as you cut into it, the rind turns out to actually be a green shell of stiff whipped cream. Then there's a very thin layer of white cream followed by a filling of strawberry sherbet that looks like the flesh of the watermelon, complete with little raisins to mimic the seeds.

COLLEEN: Amazing. And, you know, I know there's some speculation today that Lena, in perhaps a subtle way, was taking watermelon, which had anti-Black, racist connotations, and turning it into something beautiful.

VICTORIA: Yeah, I'll read from a piece published just this past spring in Oxford American magazine. Quote, “Such was Richard’s genius. She could take a food so symbolically charged, stained with prejudice, and find authorial agency in it. That dream melon wasn't just a dessert. It was a reclamation.”

COLLEEN: And, you know, it also just sounds really sublime.

VICTORIA: It does. And there's also this trompe l'oeil effect to the watermelon that reminds me of the kind of experimental dishes we've seen in more recent years at Noma, the world-renowned restaurant in Copenhagen, or even El Bulli, which was the legendary eatery in Spain. Once again, she was way ahead of her time.

ASHLEY ROSE YOUNG: This is what I loved about getting into the research with Lena's story.

VICTORIA: That's Ashley Rose Young.

ASHLEY: I am a historian and a Smithsonian research associate.

VICTORIA: She's also a curator in the rare books division at the Library of Congress.

ASHLEY: I love examining U.S. history through the lens of race and gender and ethnicity, and I do so using food as my window into the past.

VICTORIA: Ashley has spent a good chunk of the last 15 years researching Lena Richard’s life.

ASHLEY: So Lena was born in 1892 in rural Louisiana in a francophone, French-speaking area. Her father was actually born into slavery and her mother may have also been born into slavery. She was dealing with the echoes of slavery, and just the economic challenges and the desire to break away from rural life, and life tied to plantation economies.

VICTORIA: Around 1910, Lena's family moved to New Orleans.

ASHLEY: New Orleans is a bustling city, very different. It's in the midst of the Jim Crow South. So, of course, segregation would have followed her from the rural South into New Orleans as well. Like many Black women in the South at that time, Lena started working as a domestic--essentially a cleaner and a cook. She was still attending school at the time that she began working part-time for a wealthy New Orleans family known as the Vairins. And this was a white family that had four daughters. Alice Vairin was their mother and was very involved in Lena's life.

VICTORIA: At first, Lena was just preparing the kids' lunches.

ASHLEY: But there was an opportunity that arose when the Vairins' cook left employment and Alice asked Lena if she could fill in for a dinner and prepare a dinner for the family.

VICTORIA: Immediately, it became clear to Alice Vairin that Lena Richard was not just a cook. She possessed an innate talent. She was a born chef.

ASHLEY: She had this ancestral wisdom that was passed down from one generation to the next; these really important connections to recipes like gumbo and jambalaya and other dishes, again, that were these throughlines for enslaved African American women and their descendants. There was something that she understood about cooking that wasn't just your average way of knowing flavor and knowing how to create something that was special.

VICTORIA: Alice and Lena became close.

ASHLEY: Alice actually spent a lot of time with Lena in the kitchen, which is kind of an odd arrangement in the Jim Crow South, for a white employer to spend so much time with a hired chef.

VICTORIA: Eventually, Alice offered to send Lena to a cooking school, the Fannie Farmer School in Boston.

ASHLEY: That was one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the nation at the time, specifically for women and mainly for white women. But there were opportunities to petition the school to ask for special permission for an African American student to attend. Alice and Lena were determined and worked their magic, so to speak.

COLLEEN: Wow. So they had to make sure this was OK with the white students?

VICTORIA: Yes. Boston might not have been the Jim Crow South, but every white student at the school still had to give written permission for Lena Richard to attend. She was accepted to study in Boston in the summer of 1918.

ASHLEY: This is in the midst of World War I, and Lena, a young Black woman, is going to head north by herself, without many networks in the north. But she heads north to do so. And she attends the school.

VICTORIA: Later in life, when Lena reflected back on her time in Boston, she famously said…

ASHLEY: “I learned really quickly that they weren't going to teach me anything that I didn't already know.” Her classmates really were interested in Creole cuisine. It was revered at that time. Regional cuisines are of great interest to Americans in the early 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and Creole cuisine, it was on a pedestal. I mean, this was a cousin or a sister to French cuisine.

VICTORIA: And so Lena, a student at the Fannie Farmer School, found herself doing informal classes for her fellow students and teaching them about Creole cuisine.

ASHLEY: She liked being a teacher. She liked sharing Creole cuisine and her knowledge and her family's knowledge with people.

VICTORIA: I think what is quite interesting about this chapter of Lena's life is that this is the moment where she goes out into the wider world, and is able to sort of measure her own skills as a chef against the larger backdrop of American cuisine at the time.

COLLEEN: Yeah. And perhaps she also gets the bug for teaching.

VICTORIA: Yes. As she starts to share her knowledge of Creole cuisine with the other students, she's not only honing her teaching skills, she's learning the value of the knowledge that she has to share.

COLLEEN: When we come back, Lena heads to New Orleans…

VICTORIA: …where she'll open up her own cooking school.

COMMERCIAL: The Story Exchange is an award winning nonprofit media platform that elevates women's voices and achievements. If you like what you're listening to in our series on culinary pioneers, check out our episode on trailblazing San Francisco restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.

SIENA CHIANG: They called her Madame Chiang and she reveled in having the perfect outfit and creating a warm environment and welcoming people of all stripes.

COMMERCIAL: And stay tuned for more, including an upcoming episode on Southern legend Edna Lewis.

COLLEEN: Welcome back. We're sharing the story of Lena Richard of New Orleans, a prominent chef of Creole cuisine…

VICTORIA: …who had her own cookbook, TV show, restaurants and even her own line of frozen food products way back in the 1930s and 40s, but whom history has nearly forgotten.

CHEF DEE LAVIGNE: To know that I was born and raised in New Orleans and I never knew how phenomenal this lady was… It almost hurts my soul.

VICTORIA: That's Chef Dee Lavigne.

DEE: I'm the owner of the Deelightful School of Cooking in New Orleans, Louisiana.

COLLEEN: We reached out to Dee because she is only the second Black woman in New Orleans to open up a cooking school some 80 years after Lena Richard did.

VICTORIA: Dee, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, first learned about Lena thanks to an exhibit less than 10 years ago at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Now she's following in her footsteps.

COLLEEN: Dee's cooking school is located inside the museum. Here she is making a pecan pie, a Southern classic.

DEE: So the first thing we're going to do, is we have three large eggs we're going to add to the bowl. Next, we're going to add in some delicious dark Karo syrup.

COLLEEN: OK, I have to ask, we always hear the terms Creole and Cajun thrown around as two distinct styles. Are they?

VICTORIA: Yeah, Dee actually broke it down for us.

DEE: Cajun cuisine is going to be more smoky. They are woodsmen. They're more sports hunters, so they eat more game and tight proteins. Creoles are more city people, right? So we eat a lot more seafood, lighter fare, but more spicy, and definitely has tomatoes. Tomatoes is a bigger separation between Cajun and Creole. Creole, tomato-laden; Cajun, no tomatoes at all.

COLLEEN: Got it.

VICTORIA: So one of Dee's favorite Creole recipes to teach is shrimp bisque.

DEE: And that was done with this stuffed shrimp head. That is definitely an old school, like, New Orleans type of style. And so, yeah, there are a lot of young people that are doing it today--not knocking any credit--but every time I see it, I know it goes back to her.

VICTORIA: The her, of course, is Lena Richard, who arrived back home to New Orleans in the fall of 1918 after studying in Boston. She went on to open up her own cooking school.

DEE: Her reasoning for owning a cooking school was impact; to teach people how to get that step up, right? How to kind of get that leg up. I think just giving people the opportunity to present themselves [as] more seasoned, more educated, more well-rounded, more polished. That's incredible to know that it was not just about her. It was really about a community as a whole and a people as a whole.

VICTORIA: Unlike Fannie Farmer's school in Boston, which was really aimed at educating a white female student body, Lena's cooking school was aimed at educating Black women.

DEE: People were working jobs that was barely paying anything, and she wanted to allow them to thrive. And the best way she could do that was through education.

VICTORIA: It was about the power of credentialing.

ASHLEY: The cooking school--

VICTORIA: That's Ashley Rose Young again.

ASHLEY: --I think stems from Lena's own experiences with culinary education. So Lena left that program with a diploma in hand and that wielded cachet in the United States at that time. And so she understood that credentialing, which was denied so many African Americans in New Orleans at that time, could really make a difference. So she opens the Lena M. Richard Catering School so that they could leave with a paper diploma signed by Lena Richard with her stamp of approval. And it gave them an opportunity to ask for higher wages.

DEE: To know that I am the only second Black woman to own a cooking school in New Orleans outside of Mama Lena is pretty incredible.

VICTORIA: Both Dee and Ashley often affectionately refer to Lena as “Mama Lena.” That's also how she was known to customers.

ASHLEY: So there's all these beautiful parallels between Dee's life and Mama Lena's life.

COLLEEN: Like Lena, Dee also cooks on TV. Here she is on local New Orleans station, WWL.

DEE: I am Chef Dee Lavigne, and today we will be making a honey apple citrus coleslaw. So you want to shake it just well enough until the dressing itself is emulsified, which means that…

COLLEEN: Numerous publications--Forbes, New York Times, Eater--have connected Dee and Lena.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): How does it feel when people say that you are kind of carrying on her legacy? And do you feel like you are?
DEE: So I went and I Googled myself and I just saw all of these articles. And…and I was like, OK. So that made me feel good, because I felt like my message was getting heard and that she was getting more visibility of, you know, about her legacy. I felt like it was never about me. I was just a messenger.

VICTORIA: By the 1930s, Lena's career was flourishing. She had now opened a few restaurants. She had the cooking school, which she was running alongside her daughter, Marie. In many ways, the cooking school really functioned as sort of a culinary laboratory for the recipes that would eventually make their way into her cookbook, the “Lena Richard Cook Book,” which she self-published in 1939. It contains over 300 recipes created by Lena, all transcribed by Marie.

COLLEEN: And I love the preface of her cookbook, which is very straightforward and to the point. Here's Dee reading from it from the Smithsonian's podcast.

DEE: “The secrets of Creole cooking, which have been kept for years by the old French chefs, are herein revealed. There is no need to experiment, for I have done the experimenting in my own laboratory kitchen as well as in my cooking school.”

VICTORIA: After her cookbook came out, Lena went up north again, this time to New York City. She began promoting her book, which gained attention from big publishers in the city, and eventually Houghton Mifflin republished it a year later as the “New Orleans Cook Book.”

COLLEEN: OK, so Lena has become at this point this nationally recognized figure.

VICTORIA: Yeah, it's at this moment that she gets the break so many cookbook authors dream of having: her own TV show.

TV CLIP: From WDSU…

VICTORIA: In 1948, WDSU, the first television station in New Orleans, hits the air. This is, of course, very early television days in America. This is a brand-new technology.

TV CLIP: We've come a long, long way in TV, but the future looks even brighter…

ASHLEY: And then come October 1949--so less than a year after WDSU kicks off for the first time--Lena's program premieres. Given her reputation in New Orleans, right, as their top star chef, it's natural to me that they would tap her to start a cooking program. And women who watched her early program would say, “It was like she was in my living room with me. It was like she was talking directly to me.”

VICTORIA: That's all we have to go by, sadly. Ashley has searched every archive imaginable and can't even find a script from the show.

ASHLEY: What I would do to be able to watch a recording of Lena on TV, to hear her voice, to see her facial expressions, to understand why she was so captivating and what made her such a great educator… You know, it's like breadcrumbs that we are trying to piece back together to understand who she was.

VICTORIA: I asked Dee, who's done a lot of TV herself, what Lena may have been like on camera.

DEE: I often think that she was quite serious when it came to food, but I still think she had an excellent sense of humor--at least in my head she did! You have to kind of be a big personality to hold and captivate. You have to be dedicated. And the word I use all the time to talk about her is just “fortitude.”

VICTORIA: I feel like we need to pause here and just take a second to think again about how incredibly ahead of her time she was. Today, food personalities are often multi-hyphenates. They've got cookbooks and restaurants, podcasts, TV shows.

COLLEEN: Mm-hm, right. And here's Lena in the 1940s, a Black woman in the Jim Crow South, doing it all. She even had a frozen food line! I don't even know how one would even do that back then, but we know from news reports [she] shipped some of her signature dishes like okra gumbo as far as New York, California, even Panama.

VICTORIA: A true multi-medium food entrepreneur. And then just like that, Lena is gone. What we know, again from news reports, is that on Sunday, November 26, 1950, Lena met with a fan who had flown in all the way from Los Angeles to try her food. It was a long day. And by the end of it, Lena complained of feeling unwell. She went home and died there early the next morning of a heart attack. She was just 58.

ASHLEY: We don't really know how far Lena would have gone with everything that she had done. But, you know, I imagine had she lived longer, more people would know her story. I think her story would have been out there along with Julia’s, all of these people who have come to define cuisines in the United States.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Do you feel like she is well-known, or is she only well-known in kind of, like, the culinary history community? Does the average chef working in New Orleans today know who she is?
ZELLA: For those who do their research, I mean, here's the challenge.

COLLEEN: This is Zella Palmer again from Dillard University, Louisiana's oldest HBCU.

ZELLA: When I think about how other chefs are celebrated from other parts of the U.S., compared to how Black New Orleans chefs are celebrated, it's very troubling. And it goes back to New Orleans always being seen, exotified, you know, or just like, being seen as an outsider. And I wonder why. Is it because the food is quite different from the rest of the U.S., or because of the kind of intimidation of these chefs who have so much talent--not being able to share the spotlight with other chefs? And it's the proximity also to New York, right? New York is the media capital of the world. So if you have more proximity to New York's media machine, then, of course, you're going to get more attention. But we're at the end of--we're at the bottom, at the boot.

COLLEEN: So do we think Lena has been forgotten because she's not just from New Orleans, but also Black and female?

VICTORIA: I mean, would it really be that shocking to say that a Black woman in America has not been properly recognized or remembered for her work? I asked Zella about it, and I feel like her answer speaks volumes.

ZELLA: Black culture is used as a vehicle to bring the cool, but erase the people.

VICTORIA: As we end this episode, I wanted to circle back to this broader idea that we've been exploring throughout our series: that there are many overlooked or little-known American women who contributed so much to what we think of today as American food.

COLLEEN: Right. Which is so much more than the stereotypical hamburgers and hot dogs.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Where do you see the food and the cuisine of New Orleans sort of fitting into this bigger story?
DEE: I like to look at it as world cuisine.

VICTORIA: That's Dee Lavigne again.

DEE: There's French, heavy African, heavy Spanish, heavy Indigenous American. Like, it's all tied in together. And I look at it as, this is what America was supposed to be. When I look at New Orleans food, this is what the idea, the original idea of America, this is what it was supposed to be. You were supposed to be able to put all of these things together and make something incredible.

ASHLEY: We are all connected.

VICTORIA: And here's Ashley Rose Young again.

ASHLEY: That is the tapestry that weaves together food in America. I wouldn't call it a cuisine necessarily. I think we have cuisines, plural, in America. It's mingling. It's mixing. It's fusion. It's rife with political struggles. It's full of love. It's pain and sorrow. It's joy and generosity all blended into one gorgeous and complicated and horrible and lovely, soupy stew. The gumbo of America.

COLLEEN: The gumbo of America. I like that.

VICTORIA: I do, too. And we have Lena Richard, author of the first Creole cookbook, chef, restaurant owner, frozen food entrepreneur and TV host, to thank for that.

COLLEEN: And we thank you for listening.

VICTORIA: This has been The Story Exchange. Join us next time to hear more stories about innovative and inspirational women doing the things you'd never dream of. Or maybe you would. If you liked this podcast, tell your friends about us and share it on social media. It helps other people find the show. And visit our website at thestoryexchange.org, where you'll find news, videos and tips for entrepreneurial women.

COLLEEN: And we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at info at thestoryexchange.org or find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Bluesky. I'm Colleen DeBaise, reporting by Victoria Flexner. Sound editing provided by Nusha Balyan. Production coordinator is Noel Flego. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wong. Our mixer is Pat Donahue, recorded at Cutting Room Studios in New York City.

COLLEEN DEBAISE: Hi there. I'm Colleen DeBaise, and welcome to The Story Exchange. Today I'm joined by food historian Victoria Flexner.

VICTORIA FLEXNER: Hey, Colleen!

COLLEEN: Hey, Vic. We're continuing our conversation about the women who helped define American food culture.

VICTORIA: Yes. We're looking at the women, some of whose names you may not be too familiar with, but who defined the ways in which we write about food, how we eat, how we cook, and how we talk about food.

COLLEEN: In today's episode, we're taking you to 1960s San Francisco, and inside the legendary Chinese restaurant, The Mandarin.

VICTORIA: On any given night, you could walk into its upscale dining room and hear the sizzle of pan-fried potstickers and smell signature dishes like smoked tea duck or beggar's chicken or peppery Szechuan eggplant.

COLLEEN: Mm! And in the center of it all, holding court, often amid celebrity guests, would be the owner, Cecilia Chiang.

SIENA CHIANG: My grandmother was the quintessential front of house host. They called her Madame Chiang, and she reveled in having the perfect outfit and creating a warm environment and welcoming people of all stripes.

VICTORIA: That's Siena Chiang.

SIENA: And I am Cecilia Chiang's granddaughter.

COLLEEN: And Vic, you sat down with Siena recently to talk about how her grandmother, who passed away five years ago at age 100, famously brought authentic Chinese cuisine to America.

VICTORIA: Yeah, and Cecilia Chiang wasn't just a restaurateur. She also served as a mentor to numerous chefs and food personalities, like James Beard and Julia Child, teaching them about the diversity and complexity of Chinese cuisine.

COLLEEN: Yeah. Here's Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in California.

ALICE WATERS: Cecilia Chiang is the Julia Child of Chinese food in America.

VICTORIA: And I also spoke to Siena about her grandmother's truly remarkable backstory. Born to a wealthy family near Shanghai, she grew up in Beijing.

SIENA: In a 52-room house, mansion.

VICTORIA: When the Japanese invaded in 1937, Cecilia fled her home, traveling over 700 miles on foot to unoccupied China in the south. And when the Communist Party seized power in 1949, she left the country altogether.

COLLEEN: Yeah, it's an incredible story. But before we dive into Cecilia's background, let's talk a bit about the history of Chinese food in America.

VICTORIA: Chinese cuisine is really entwined in our culture. I think one could argue that it's as American as hamburgers or apple pie! The first Chinese restaurant in the U.S. opened way back in 1849, and I can't think of many places I've been to in America that don't have a Chinese restaurant or takeout spot.

PAUL FREEDMAN: There are, what, 35,000 or so of them in the U.S., more than McDonald's and KFC combined. And the American infatuation with Chinese food goes back to the late 19th century.

COLLEEN: That's Paul Freedman.

PAUL: I teach history at Yale.

COLLEEN: Paul is also the author of “Ten Restaurants That Changed America,” and he included The Mandarin on that list.

PAUL: It introduced to many people, including myself when I was in graduate school at Berkeley in the 1970s, Northern Chinese cuisine, Chinese cuisine that wasn't Cantonese, Chinese cuisine that had a lot of spice, like the Sichuan region, dishes like potstickers or hot and sour soup.

COLLEEN: Here's a clip we have of Cecilia herself talking about her restaurant.

CECILIA: I don't want to do something other restaurants have. That's why my menu, you cannot find any chop suey, egg foo young, and chow mein!

COLLEEN: She's saying in her restaurant, she didn't want her chefs making stereotypical dishes like chop suey, egg foo young and chow mein.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): What is chop suey?
PAUL: So chop suey was the dish that really made Chinese restaurants, from the beginning of what was called, at the time, the chop suey craze, 1897, until it started to fade out in the 1960s.

COLLEEN: Yeah, I remember when I was growing up, supermarkets used to sell these chop suey kits, kind of like the old El Paso taco kits you can find in grocery stores today. And this was really my introduction to Chinese food. I think it was for many Americans.

PAUL: People of my age had it in school. I mean, it was ubiquitous. We had either chop suey or chow mein. The thing that Americans really didn't get, or didn't bother to understand until really well into the 20th century, was stir-frying, because this was so alien to Western European ways of cooking, that gives so much of Chinese food its distinctive taste.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): It's almost like a style, a method of cooking from China, that was very different from Western cooking--I suppose, American, European. You're chopping things into smaller pieces so that they can cook faster with more fuel efficiency. But it's interesting that that then becomes emblematic of what Americans were sort of thinking of as the entire culinary repertoire, when really it's just a style of preparation.
PAUL: Yeah. I mean, you could argue that General Tso's chicken is the chop suey of the late 20th and early 21st century. It's a dish that really doesn't exist in China.

VICTORIA: And it's important to note here that this is something we see again and again with immigrant cuisine in America.

COLLEEN: Hm. How so?

VICTORIA: A new cuisine is introduced, and aspects of it are Americanized, converted into a format that will appeal to American palates and feel somehow familiar.

COLLEEN: Yeah, like Tex-Mex somehow evolving out of Mexican food.

VICTORIA: Exactly. Or the California roll with Japanese food.

COLLEEN: Chicken parm with Italian food.

VICTORIA: We could go on and on with these. But see, this is what made The Mandarin so important, and what makes Cecilia Chiang such an icon. She decided she wasn't just going to serve chop suey versions of Chinese food. She was going to serve the real deal.

SIENA: She took a lot of pride in introducing people to what she knew to be regional, authentic, high-end, upscale cuisine, like the cuisine that she ate, that her, you know, trained chefs cooked in her childhood.

VICTORIA: That's Siena Chiang again.

SIENA: You know, my grandmother was a little bit of an elite person. And so I do think that there was also a bit of a separation between the food of, kind of, the immigrants who came to build the railroads, and the type of food and the type of experience she had known, which I always find just really important to share. Because there are often folks who want to talk about her as a role model, or the legacy, and she was this immigrant…And absolutely, that's totally true…and she had a slightly different experience than the kind of mass immigration stories that we know from that time period from China.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): And I feel like one of your grandmother's legacies is that she showed Americans that Chinese food is not just like, some cheap meal; this is haute cuisine.
SIENA: I think that there was a little bit of, like, “I'm going to show them, they're going to take me seriously. They're going to take this food seriously,” as a proxy for taking, you know, Chinese culture seriously.

PAUL: She also had things like beggar's chicken, just cooked in a clay pot, which you had to order a day or two in advance.

CECILIA: I think this is one of the most popular dishes in The Mandarin.
LAURENCE JOSSEL: Now, I've looked at the recipe and the recipe is at least two hours in the oven, right?

VICTORIA: That's San Francisco chef Laurence Jossel cooking beggar's chicken with Cecilia in 2016.

LAURENCE: A lot of the dish is the presentation at the table, right? So you crack at the table?
CECILIA: Yeah, you crack on the table.
LAURENCE: Right.

VICTORIA: It was a favorite dish of James Beard.

LAURENCE: So first thing is one teaspoon of five spice… Oyster sauce… Let's marinate the chicken. So now you think we're ready to make the stuffing?
CECILIA: Yeah.
LAURENCE: These are the shiitake…water chestnuts…green onion…OK, and then ham.

VICTORIA: So what they're doing is taking this beautifully marinated stuffed chicken, and then wrapping giant lotus leaves around it, and then completely encasing it in a shell of clay.

CECILIA: …in the clay.
LAURENCE: In the clay. But what's important is to keep it airtight, huh?

VICTORIA: And back in the days of The Mandarin, this would be carried over to the table where a guest would then be given a special hammer to dramatically crack the clay shell open.

CECILIA: You know how to crack it, do you?
LAURENCE: I'm going to try. Let's see.
CECILIA: (laughter) Wow.
LAURENCE: OK!
CECILIA: That looks like the clay is perfect. See the heat?
LAURENCE: It's very hot.
CECILIA: Yeah, very hot.
LAURENCE: It smells delicious.

PAUL: She was not so much interested in Americanizing Chinese food, or even in authenticity, but just of giving people a sense of the tradition of a world that was lost.

VICTORIA: After the break…

CECILIA: That's a really hard trip. Took us from Beijing to Chongqing, five and a half months.
VICTORIA: Cecilia flees her childhood home in Beijing to escape the Japanese army sweeping south through China.

COLLEEN: We'll be right back.

COMMERCIAL: The Story Exchange is an award-winning, nonprofit media platform that elevates women's voices and achievements. If you like what you're listening to in our series on culinary pioneers, check out our episode on famous food writer MFK Fisher.

ANNE ZIMMERMAN: She's with James Beard. She's with Julia Child. She's the godmother of the American wine world and food world.

COMMERCIAL: And stay tuned for more episodes to come on American food pioneers Lena Richard and Edna Lewis.

COLLEEN: Welcome back. I'm here with food historian Victoria Flexner talking about the legendary restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.

VICTORIA: Her San Francisco restaurant, The Mandarin, redefined Chinese food for Americans. And I think to better understand the legacy of her work, we need to look at the world that she came from.

SIENA: She, by all accounts, grew up in a very privileged, kind of aristocratic, for that time and place, life.

VICTORIA: Cecilia and her 12 siblings…

SIENA: …grew up in a 52-room house mansion. They had help. They had chefs who made delicious meals.

VICTORIA: But then in 1937, when Cecilia was in college, the Japanese invaded northern China. It was the beginning of World War II in Asia.

NEWSREEL: By 1937, Japan was ready for the next step in its plan of world conquest to bring the rest of China under Japanese rule.

VICTORIA: The Japanese military easily defeated the Chinese Nationalist Army and swept south.

NEWSREEL: This is the first mass bombing from the air of a helpless civilian population.

VICTORIA: It was a time of terror for the Chinese in their path. Literally hundreds of thousands of civilians were massacred, tortured and starved.

CECILIA: Problem with all families, we didn't have enough food, everything on ration, no rice. We cannot get anything.

VICTORIA: That's Cecilia speaking in the 2016 documentary series, “The Kitchen Wisdom of Cecilia Chiang.”

CECILIA: In January 1942, my number five sister and I, we decided we really should leave. We all cried because we don't know when we're going to see them again. And also very scared.

VICTORIA: Like thousands of others, the Chiang sisters made their way across the country to the city of Chongqing in southwest China, which was not under Japanese control.

SIENA: They actually left on a train, is my understanding, but then at some point the train line ended. And so she walked.

CECILIA: We walk night time, and day time, we try to find a place to rest. And the Japanese airplane was flying really low and shooting all the students all the way. Very hard to get some decent food because from village to village. And we didn't have a map. We have to ask the people in the village, what is the next village, and how far it is from here to Chongqing?

SIENA: Some of the stuff that I know around this period is not stuff she ever talked directly to me about. I have a sense that it was a long, long time ago. By the time she and I had our own relationship, it would have been 70 years before that time. But also really painful, you know, traumatic memories of violent, you know, upsetting things that the Japanese did and did to classmates of hers and people that she knew.

CECILIA: That's a really hard trip. Took us from Beijing to Chongqing five and a half months.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): How do you think it may be informed aspects of her personality, in the way she approached her career and her life and her work?
SIENA: It's a great question. And she definitely never hid anything, her history. But I do think that people who go through things like that… I think it's hard for a lot of us to imagine. She lived very in the moment. She was a very present person and she was a very, like, “Don't complain and just make the most of things.”

VICTORIA: In Chongqing, Cecilia met the man who would become her husband.

SIENA: I think they were there for a little while. They started to have their relationship and their family there.

VICTORIA: But just as World War II ended, China erupted in civil war between the American-backed nationalist government and the ever-growing armies of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong. By 1948, the communists had won control of North China and began to move south. They faced little resistance.

*Mao Zedong speaks as a crowd applauds*

VICTORIA: That's Mao declaring victory a year later in 1949. Like thousands of other wealthy families who feared persecution under communist rule, Cecilia and her husband made the decision to leave the country.

SIENA: It was very much a last plane out sort of narrative, a last-ditch effort, “we just made it out,” narrative and feeling.

VICTORIA: They took their two children to Tokyo and began a new life.

SIENA: They invested in and opened a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo called The Forbidden City.

VICTORIA: But after a few years, Cecilia made a fateful decision. She headed to California to support her sister who had moved there and whose husband had recently died. Cecilia's own husband chose to stay in Japan.

SIENA: I know my grandmother and I think she was a little bit restless and maybe didn't really want to be in Japan.

VICTORIA: Pretty understandable considering what she and her sister went through during the Japanese invasion. And when she got to San Francisco…

SIENA: …she ended up staying there and never going back.

CECILIA: You know, you say you heard so much about the United States. You know, also you see a lot of movies about the United States… You get here, not quite the same!

VICTORIA: There's a famous story of how Cecilia came to open The Mandarin.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Your grandma's walking down the street. She runs into two people she knows from China, not from Japan, right?
SIENA: Yeah.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): And what ensues?
SIENA: OK, this is going to be a timeout moment. I'm going to tell you the real story.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): OK. (laughter)
SIENA: Unless you want me to just tell you the known story--
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Oh no!
SIENA: --I'm going to tell you the real story. I figured! I figured! OK. The story that everyone knows is that they're walking down the street outside of Chinatown and they run into some people that they'd known back in China and that those folks were like, “Oh, my gosh, we're so excited that we ran into you. We are in the process of trying to open a restaurant and trying to negotiate with the landlord. And you speak way better English than we do. Could you please just come help us? Just a one time favor.”
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Just like, a translation.
SIENA: Just a translation favor. Right. The version for the Spielberg movie. Ran into them on the street, goes to a meeting, negotiates with the landlord, she signed the papers--which doesn't quite make sense, if she’s doing them a translation favor. So I think, yeah, the real version is she becomes interested in being a part of this venture, puts up money and then for some reason or another, those other folks back out. And yeah, she becomes responsible for opening this business.

COLLEEN: OK, so the legend was that she was kind of scammed, but actually she was savvy enough to see the possibility.

VICTORIA: That's exactly right.

SIENA: So in these letters that she's sending back and forth to my grandfather, it becomes clear to me that, no, there was actually like a little bit of intention behind the possibility of opening a restaurant.

VICTORIA: The Mandarin opened its doors in 1961, and it wasn't in Chinatown.

SIENA: She is kind of an insider-outsider. The Chinese immigrants that had settled in San Francisco at that time were from a very different part of China. They're from a different class. They spoke Cantonese. My grandmother and her family spoke Mandarin because they were from the north.

VICTORIA: Hence its name, The Mandarin.

PAUL: She was quite successful, as you say, for kind of contingent and even accidental reasons.

VICTORIA: That's Paul Freedman again, the historian. We talked about the rise of The Mandarin's popularity and how it shifted dramatically when a journalist named Herb Cain came to visit.

PAUL: Herb Cain was, on the one hand, a gossip columnist in the era when gossip columnists were at the height of their powers. But he was more of an intellectual and not just a follower of stars and socialites. And he went to the restaurant and in his column, said, “This is the best Chinese food I've had this side of the Pacific.” And the next day, you know, there was a line out the door.

VICTORIA: The restaurant moved to a new and bigger location.

PAUL: It was in a restored space in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Center, which had been a chocolate factory; one of the first kind of examples of reusing industrial buildings. It was also elegant, and very deliberately. Cecilia Chiang said that she didn't want dragons. She didn't want red and gold decoration. It was modern. It had works of contemporary art.

VICTORIA: We all know what follows a hot restaurant review. Everyone wants a table. The phone is ringing off the hook. Lines are out the door. And in short order, the rich and the famous become clientele.

CECILIA: We have presidents like Reagan, Bush and also Kennedy families. Rock singers, models, fashion designers and the movie stars. Every time when John Lennon came to town, that “must” stop is The Mandarin.

SIENA: There's a story about the members of Jefferson Airplane coming, the rock stars showing up. And at that time, San Francisco was a little bit of a conservative, snobby place. Folks like that who were coming on tour were not being taken seriously, or maybe couldn't get into the black tie or, you know, tie and jacket type of establishment; I think out of snobbery, and out of, like, “We don't know if these people can pay.” And my grandmother was like, “I'm going to trust these folks.”

VICTORIA: The members of Jefferson Airplane became fast friends of Madame Chiang's.

SIENA: She was a curious, inquisitive, pretty open-minded person. She had a way of making people feel seen and special.

VICTORIA: Cecilia didn't just host the Hollywood stars at her restaurant. She also taught culinary stars like James Beard and Julia Child how to cook Chinese food. Well into her 90s, she mentored other Bay Area chefs and restaurateurs, like her good friend Alice Waters.

ALICE: Going into your restaurant, it felt like going into a whole other world…

SIENA: So even though she was doing regional Chinese food, she was in the mix with Alice, who was young, in her—Alice would have been in her twenties. Alice and my grandmother had a beautiful, intergenerational friendship, that was definitely mentorship, and they traveled together. And yeah, were women running restaurants at the same time.

VICTORIA: As Siena and I were wrapping up our conversation, I asked her about how she sees Chinese food fitting into this larger story of American food.

SIENA: American food is…I have a phrase that I'm trying to popularize, which is “second gen food.” Like, there's a lot of people who have parents who are immigrants, who are melding their experience of growing up in America, being exposed to other cultures, with their parents’ Indian background or Chinese background or, you know, anywhere. And I think my grandmother was on the forefront of doing that.

SIENA: My grandmother sold the restaurant in the early 90s, and it closed in the mid-2000s.

VICTORIA: And one last thing.

SIENA: I guess we haven't talked about P.F. Chang's, which was my dad's endeavor. He'll be happy if he listens to this for me to say that.

VICTORIA: Siena's father, Cecilia's son, Philip, would go on to open P.F. Chang's, a fast, casual Chinese restaurant chain, of which there are hundreds of locations across the globe today.

SIENA: She laid the groundwork for my dad to definitely do that.

VICTORIA: But back to what Cecilia was doing.

SIENA: She was trying to hold on to that, where she was from. And of course, bringing it into a new context where you have access to different ingredients, where you're interacting with new types of people; it morphs and it shifts and it becomes diasporic food.

CECILIA: I do something nobody else going to do it. A lot of my famous dishes, like minced squab, Peking duck, smoked tea duck, make me, you know, successful.

COLLEEN: Well, I really wish I could order some beggar's chicken right now.

VICTORIA: Yeah, I've already started googling where I can buy edible clay and lotus leaves to make it at home. Do I need edible clay…?

COLLEEN: Join us next time as we make our way from the West Coast down to Louisiana…

VICTORIA: …to New Orleans…

COLLEEN: …where a woman named Lena Richard became a famous Creole chef who wrote cookbooks, opened a cooking school, had numerous restaurants…

VICTORIA: And she became the first Black woman way back in 1951 to have a cooking show on TV in America.

COLLEEN: We thank Paul Freedman and especially Siena Chiang for sharing their thoughts on Cecilia Chiang.

VICTORIA: And we thank you for listening. This has been The Story Exchange. Join us next time to hear more stories about innovative and inspirational women doing the things you'd never dream of. Or maybe you would. If you liked this podcast, tell your friends about us and feel free to share it on social media. It helps other people find the show and visit our website at thestoryexchange.org, where you're going to find news, videos and tips for entrepreneurial women.

COLLEEN: And we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at info at thestoryexchange.org or find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Bluesky. I'm Colleen DeBaise, reporting by Victoria Flexner. Sound editing provided by Nusha Balyan. Production coordinator is Noel Flego. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wong. Our mixer is Pat Donoghue. Recorded at Cutting Room Studios in New York City.

VICTORIA: And our thanks to Charlie Pinsky for very kindly letting us use audio from his series “The Kitchen Wisdom of Cecilia Chiang.”

COLLEEN DEBAISE: Hi there, I'm Colleen DeBaise. Welcome to the Story Exchange. I've got our very own Victoria Flexner here.

VICTORIA FLEXNER: I'm a writer and a food historian.

COLLEEN: And today, we see a lot of high profile women in food--chefs and restaurant owners and of course TV hosts like Eva Longoria.

EVA LONGORIA: I'm exploring Mexico to see how the people, their lands and their past, have shaped a culinary tradition.

COLLEEN: And literal living legends like Alice Waters.

VICTORIA: The famous Chez Panisse owner and chef was recently featured on the Legends season of Emmy nominated series Chef's Table.

CHEF’S TABLE: Alice Waters is the mother of the farm to table movement. It's her uncompromising...

VICTORIA: These shows got me thinking about some other female legends in food, specifically American food, who we might not be as familiar with today.

COLLEEN: And as we approach the semi-quincentennial--

VICTORIA: --which is the 250 year anniversary of America that's coming up in 2026--

COLLEEN: --this country might be very divided, but we do all love our food.

VICTORIA: Yeah. I mean, how would we even define American food today? It's so much more than the stereotypes of hamburgers and hot dogs.

COLLEEN: It's diverse--

VICTORIA: --it's regional--

COLLEEN: --and it's personal.

VICTORIA: And at this moment in U.S. history, I think American food culture is really worthy of investigation. Who are the legends who helped to define it?

COLLEEN: Or perhaps more importantly for us here at The Story Exchange, who are some of the women, some of the lesser known women who helped define American food culture? To kick off this special series, we're going to head to the super steamy New York City offices at The Story Exchange--

VICTORIA: --to talk about the great American food writer, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, better known by her initials, MFK Fisher.

COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Hi! How's it going?
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): It is warm. I'm like, sweating in my t-shirt.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Is the radiator on?
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): I think it might be.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Okay. All right, so tell me what you're doing.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): I am peeling a tangerine. I got these at Mr. Kiwi yesterday…Lay it out on a paper towel and lay them on top of a radiator to cook them.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Why are you doing this sort of weird experiment?
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): It's a good question, Colleen. It's a good question. (laughter)

VICTORIA: So when MFK Fisher was spending time in France in the 1930s, she would carefully lay out little pieces of tangerine on her hot radiator.

COLEEN (FROM TAPE): They look very orange and plumpy.

VICTORIA: And then stick them on her snowy windowsill to chill. Yeah.

COLLEEN: And she wrote a pretty famous short story about this.

VICTORIA: Yes. She wrote, quote, “Almost every person has something secret that he likes to eat. It was then that I discovered little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable.”

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): It's a very good tangerine.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): It's very good. Yeah. Did you try this one? I tried the fresh batch.

VICTORIA: Originally from California, Fisher was a prolific writer. She wrote over 30 books in her career. Books about her life, her day to day, the meals that punctuated them. She wrote about her life in France, her time in Europe. She wrote about love.

MFK FISHER: People ask me, why do you write about food and eating and drinking?

COLLEEN: That is MFK Fisher herself talking from a documentary called “The Art of Eating.”

FISHER: The easiest answer is to say that like most other humans, I am hungry.

COLLEEN: Her 1937 essay “Borderland” inspired our tangerine radiator experiment and kind of perfectly encapsulates her style.

VICTORIA: Totally. She's ostensibly writing about tangerines, but there's so much more there. She describes the world going by outside the window; watching late afternoon newspapers get delivered; soldiers, quote, “stomping back from the Rhine;” prostitutes, quote, “mincing smartly into tea rooms.” But there's also this sense of loneliness and boredom too. It's this super quiet little peek into the interior moments of someone's life.

ACTOR AS FISHER: The sections of the tangerine are gone and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell. There must be someone, though, who understands what I mean. Probably everyone does because of his own secret eatings.

COLLEEN: If you go into any bookstore today, at the front of the shop, there's usually a table with new releases, and there's sure to be some written by chefs or food media personalities.

VICTORIA: Yeah. People want to know about the behind the scenes of restaurants. They might pick up Gabrielle Hamilton's “Blood, Bones, and Butter,” Marcus Samuelson's “Yes, Chef,” or look out for Padma Lakshmi's new book, “Padma's All-American.”

COLLEEN: Yeah. Although not as many people are familiar with MFK Fisher's books, published so long ago.

VICTORIA: Mm. But I think once you kind of delve into her writing, people will find that her prose, her stories, they're very familiar, because her writing really served as the basis for the genre that we now know as food memoir.

ANNE ZIMMERMAN: And I think what's amazing and notable is that it's very intimate, right? Like that's what we love about MFK Fisher is the intimacy of her voice.

VICTORIA: That's Anne Zimmerman.

ANNE: I wrote a biography of MFK Fisher that's called “An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of MFK Fisher.”

VICTORIA: Needless to say, Anne is a fan of Fisher, who passed away in 1992 at the age of 83.

ANNE: She's with James Beard. She's with Julia Child. She's the godmother of the American wine world and food world.

VICTORIA: And I spoke to Anne because I don't think it's a stretch to say that the way that we write about food, the way that we think about food, the way that we talk about food, it can all be traced directly back to MFK Fisher.

ANNE: I think it is true that the thing that really sets MFK Fisher apart, especially if we're bringing her into the contemporary sphere, is that she was really not a recipe writer. She was an eater. She was a sensual person. She enjoyed things. She observed things.

VICTORIA: One of Fisher's most famous titles is “How to Cook a Wolf.” It was published during 1942 in the middle of World War II. The book on its face is a guide to cooking during food shortages. The wolf in the title refers to hunger or poverty knocking at the door, but it's far more than a cookbook. It's a philosophical meditation on how to live well with less.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): I mean, I loved it, but it was like, yeah, what did I just read? Like it's not a cookbook…

ANNE: Right, the narrative food memoir essay. And I do think she was the person who pioneered that. I do not think of her work as being recipe focused. It is not like, “Oh, Easter Sunday is coming up. This is what you should do.” Like that hostessing, you know, she is not Martha Stewart. That is not her vibe. Her vibe is like, be out in the world, noticing and enjoying yourself and having these unique experiences and writing about them.

COLLEEN: And yet, MFK Fisher is actually not that well known, at least these days, outside of food circles.

VICTORIA: I think that's true. Funnily enough, even Anne Zimmerman, her own biographer, hadn't really known much about her until she was getting her master's degree in women's studies at San Diego State. Originally, she'd planned to do her thesis on Zelda Fitzgerald.

ANNE: Fisher and Fitzgerald are very close together in the library. And I had heard the name MFK Fisher from some of these people that worked in the wine industry in Oregon, but very much in a name droppy sort of way, like, “Oh, MFK Fisher, oh, MFK Fisher.” And I would sort of like nod and be like, “Oh, sure, MFK Fisher, yes, obviously.” (laughter)

VICTORIA: So she checked out a whole bunch of books by MFK Fisher.

ANNE: I just read and cooked and read and thought and cooked. And by the end of it, I was like, this is who I want to write just this paper about.

COLLEEN: OK, when I think of food memoir, I think of two people from more modern times. Ruth Reichl, who was one of my favorites.

VICTORIA: She was the former Gourmet editor who wrote “Tender at the Bone” and more recently, “Save Me the Plums.”

COLLEEN: Yeah, so good. And I also think, of course, of the late, great Anthony Bourdain.

VICTORIA: Always. For anyone who doesn't know, Bourdain basically blew apart the restaurant industry when he wrote “Kitchen Confidential” in 2000. He then had a number of different shows on TV over the years that were really unlike any other food or travel show that came before it.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I'm Anthony Bourdain. I write. I travel. I eat. And I'm hungry for more.

COLLEEN: And yet, we're saying MFK Fisher basically did all this first.

VICTORIA: Not just first, but about oh, 60 or 70 years before anyone else was doing it. I asked Anne about this.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Her writing is so unbelievably unique. And I'm curious what your thoughts on her influence on food memoir [are] and also how it compares to work in this space today.

ANNE: It's going back to this idea of like, writer versus cook. I used to kind of bristle at the Anthony Bourdain comp. I've come around to it a little bit just because they both had such singular personalities. Different personalities. I mean, to me, it's like a total Venn diagram thing where there is overlap and the little centers is the singular voice and the ability to like, write very embodied, close to the bone narrative that's voicey.

VICTORIA: Whereas Bourdain's work is super macho...

ANNE: Yeah, macho. Exactly.

VICTORIA: ...MFK Fisher's work has a different style.

ANNE: It's not like her vibe is feminine, whatever that means. But the throughline for me is this, like, doing the work, going to the place that might not seem like the most obvious place. It's not the place with the best light. Doesn't have like, the floral Instagram background so that you can take a picture of your smoothie or whatever. And then talking to the people that were there, hearing the story and then eating the food and talking about the food and making a connection between all of those things. I mean, that to me is quintessential MFK Fisher. And I think there are a lot of people who are doing it. And the fact that there's not one heir to her legacy just proves like, how great she truly is.

COLLEEN: When we come back, we'll dive into more of MFK Fisher's backstory--

VICTORIA: --a fascinating and adventurous life filled with tales of travel, heartbreak and living unapologetically.

COLLEEN: We'll be right back.

COMMERCIAL: The Story Exchange is an award winning nonprofit media platform that elevates women's voices and achievements. Check out our site to read hundreds of startup stories and share one yourself at our 1,000 Stories+ project. Find out more at thestoryexchange.org.

COLLEEN: Welcome back. We've been talking about the writer MFK Fisher--

VICTORIA: --who essentially created the genre of food memoir and who profoundly influenced the way that we write and think about food.

COLLEEN: So something that jumps out to me about MFK Fisher, especially being a woman, is that she seems ahead of her time.

VICTORIA: I think in many ways she was. She started publishing her work in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't writing about housekeeping or how to cook a nutritious meal for your family. She was writing about the lived experience of eating and cooking and drinking.

ANNE: My whole theory was and still is that she was a woman who married very young.

VICTORIA: That's Anne Zimmerman again, Fisher's biographer.

ANNE: She came from a fairly cloistered upbringing, as many women did in that time.

VICTORIA: Fisher's mother was a homemaker. Her father worked in newspapers. She briefly attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she would meet her future husband Al Fisher. They got married in 1929 when Fisher was just 21 years old, and they moved abroad a couple weeks later.

ANNE: She went to France in 1929, which sounds fancy, but there really is no equivalent.

VICTORIA: Yeah, France was still recovering from World War I. It was not the France that we know today. They moved to Dijon in eastern France, where Al was getting his PhD.

ANNE: She didn't speak the language. Her husband was totally preoccupied with his job, which was to be a student at a university. She had no friends. She was totally alone. She could only communicate with her family by letters that took a very long time to get back and forth.

VICTORIA: And it's in these letters that we really begin to see MFK Fisher's voice.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): I was wondering if you could speak to how her practice of writing letters home when she first moved to France with Al maybe helped define or inform the style that she would become known for.

ANNE: That's a great question. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually asked me that question, and it's such a good one. So she was writing prolifically, very regularly, very prolifically; even though she was writing about how happy and perfect and she's so in love and she's having this like, amazing time as a newlywed with her husband…that was sort of the first clue to me that maybe not everything was as depicted.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): The tangerine story to me feels like something you would do in like, the depths of quarantine, where you're like, losing it a little…
ANNE: I don't think she had a very happy marriage. So I think the whole birth of her creative voice really came from loneliness and really came from feeling outside of where she was, but wanting to get inside and realizing that pleasure and walking and soaking up the sights and the sounds and the foods and then sort of trying to replicate those foods and those experiences on the page for the people that she was writing to at home, was a way of easing her loneliness.

VICTORIA: In her letters home to California, she wrote these vivid descriptions of the meals that she and Al were eating in France.

ACTOR AS FISHER: We ate terrines of pâté ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed fat…Then there were the snails, the best in the world, green and spitting in their delicate little coffins. There in Dijon, the cauliflowers were small and very succulent, grown in that ancient soil. Suddenly I recognized my own possibilities as a person, and I was almost stunned by the knowledge that never again would I eat or drink as I had done for my first 20 years. At 1.43 p.m. September 25th, 1929, when I picked up a last delicious crust crumb from the table, smiled dazedly at my love, peered incredulously at a great cathedral on the horizon, and recognized myself as a newborn sentient being, ready at last to live.

VICTORIA: The Fishers spent three years in France, but at the end of the day, the dream couldn't last forever.

ANNE: Right. So they did come back to the United States. I mean, part of it was, you know, his time was kind of up at the university, but they were also out of money.

VICTORIA: It was the Great Depression.

NEWSREEL: The tremendous crowds which you see gathered outside the Stock Exchange are due to the greatest crash in the history of the New York Stock Exchange and market prices.

ANNE: Even with all of like the walking around and eating amazing meals and French pastries, etc., they were living pretty close to the bone. But they were kind of continually writing specifically to her family and saying, “Could we get a little bit more money?” And then that just kind of ran out.

VICTORIA: Broke, the Fishers came home to America.

ANNE: And they were living in the Laguna Beach area with her family, kind of hopping around a little bit as he was trying to get jobs as an adjunct that he hoped would turn into like a full professor job.

VICTORIA: And MFK?

ANNE: She was bored again, trying to get pregnant, not having luck getting pregnant, and taking the bus into L.A. and sitting at the Los Angeles Public Library and starting to study the work of Brillat-Savarin, who was a famous French philosopher. And really, that in itself is sort of remarkable, just in its like—esoteric, how do you spend your days… (laughter)

VICTORIA: But then a fateful meeting occurred.

ANNE: She and Al became friends with another couple, Tim and Gigi Parrish. Tim was older. Gigi was a starlet.

VICTORIA: And at some point, the friendship between MFK and Tim became romantic. They fell in love. They --

ANNE: --ignited an affair that was truly life changing, because both of the marriages dissolved. MFK Fisher and Tim Parrish later married.

VICTORIA: Tim was the love of her life.

ANNE: Tim Parrish was the person that said to MFK Fisher, this writing is good and you could do something with it. We all know as writers that half the time what you need is somebody to kind of, A, just believe in you, but B, kind of give you the gentle nudge to say like, maybe you could do this.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Yeah, absolutely. But he also represents this like, moment where her career just really starts to flourish.
ANNE: He fed her in ways that nobody else had, and I mean that in all the ways, actual food, but then also intellectually. They went on road trips all over the United States. They went back to France. They had this little plot of land in Switzerland.

VICTORIA: And MFK Fisher was very prolific during this time.

ANNE: “Serve it Forth” came first and then “How to Cook a Wolf” and “Consider the Oyster,” which is such a wonderful book.

COLLEEN: We have a clip of MFK Fisher talking about her writing in the 1992 documentary “Writer with a Bite.”

FISHER: What would I write about if I didn't write what I know? I'd be phony and I don't like phony things.

VICTORIA: But just as her career was really taking off, Tim, who was only in his 40s, was diagnosed with Buerger's disease, which is this horrible circulatory disease that causes excruciating pain.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): How many years was it from Tim's kind of initial diagnosis until he passed?
ANNE: It was relatively quickly. He became incredibly depressed. He started smoking and drinking. That affected his circulation, which then made him more prone to clots, more prone to blood problems.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): It was this vicious cycle.
ANNE: Yeah. And then more depression, more need for painkillers. You know, he would wake up screaming in pain. In the journals, it would say things like, you know, “Tim screamed all night saying he wanted to end it all.” I don't want to misquote, but I but I feel like I remember things saying, like, “He asked me to get the gun and I said I wouldn't get the gun.” Like it was always in play, the sort of drama-slash-cinema of it. They were living like in a shack, sort of on the way to Joshua Tree, Palm Springs area. And I feel like they just went out there because it was just so intense and they just needed to be alone.

VICTORIA: One morning, MFK Fisher awoke to the sound of a single gunshot ringing out across the desert. Tim had taken his life.

ANNE: The older I get, [I] sort of just realize how incredibly formative an experience like that would be for a person.

VICTORIA: Here's MFK talking to journalist Bill Moyers about it in 1990.

BILL MOYERS: Did you know he was going to take his life?
FISHER: Oh yes, sure.
MOYERS: Did you agree to it?
FISHER: Yes, I did. It was always a shock though. I kept him from killing himself once and then I said never again, never will do that to anybody.

VICTORIA: After Tim's suicide, MFK, who was just 33 years old, descended into this really dark place.

ANNE: She's in this funk--understatement of the world--deep depression, funk, grief, sadness. And she goes to Mexico with her siblings and she writes very evocatively about a meal that she ate that she sort of says brought her back to her senses.

ACTOR AS FISHER: The bowl has beans in it, large, light, tan beans cooked with some tomato and onion and many herbs. The feeling of that hot, strong food going down into my stomach was one of the finest I have ever had.

VICTORIA: It was the first thing she had really tasted since Tim died.

ACTOR AS FISHER: The first thing that fed me, in spite of my sensuous meals always.

VICTORIA: As the waiter hovered nearby

ACTOR AS FISHER: I ate everything and finished the beer. Then I paid him and thanked him more than he could know.

ANNE: She was kind of like, “Okay, I have to keep going. I'm young, I'm divorced and widowed, but I'm young and I deserve to keep going.” She got a job writing for Hollywood. I think she had a lot of love affairs. She ended up getting pregnant and having a child alone.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Didn't she tell her family she was doing top secret government work or something while she was pregnant?
ANNE: She's writing to her family and telling them, like, “Sorry, I can't come for Thanksgiving because I have this top secret project.” She's not a spy, but she was pregnant. And then, then she became a single mother. And this was like in 1946.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): A difficult time for a woman. Always a difficult time for a woman.
ANNE: Yep.

VICTORIA: Fisher would later marry again, have another daughter, divorce again. She lived a long life, one filled with many distinct periods. She knew real pain and real heartbreak, but she also remained curious about the world and engaged with it.

ANNE: The reason I was drawn initially to biography and to memoir was because the way women tell their lives is so different than the way a man would typically tell his life. And if a man is writing a biography, it is very focused on things that happened in their job, who they met, decisions they made. Like it's all very linear--not making gross generalizations--name droppy… But women's lives are messy and they're episodic and there's reinvention and rebirth. And MFK Fisher is just like an onion with the layers. I mean, it's just constantly sort of morphing and shifting.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Mm, yeah.

COLLEEN: As we close out this episode, I'm thinking again about how weirdly close we felt to MFK Fisher as we recreated that experiment with the tangerines in our office and all the sights and sounds of it.

VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): So the little clacks of the radiator and the hissing of the heat…
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): And I should mention that we are not in 1930s France. We're in 2025 New York City.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): This is one of the things I love about food history and recreating meals, is that you begin to inhabit this sort of shared metaphysical space with the person. And if you're lucky, someone from the past left behind words or music or art or something that gives you insight into their life. But it's like she's pulling up a chair.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Yeah, yeah. I think she had a proof of this, right?
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Yeah, and sitting down with us… I know she loved gossip. I can kind of picture her like, smiling and crossing her arms as she eats a piece and maybe, you know, asking kind of a provocative question to get a little dirt on something that's going on.
COLEEN (FROM TAPE): Yeah, she’d probably want to know about our love life or something like that.

COLLEEN: Thank you for spending time with us and MFK Fisher.

VICTORIA: In the rest of this series, we will continue to look at some of the women who helped to define American food culture, particularly those you may not have heard of. Join us next week as we take a look at the life and legacy of Cecilia Chiang.

SIENA CHIANG: She was a trailblazer. She did her own thing, not necessarily what people thought she should do.

VICTORIA: This has been the Story Exchange.

COLLEEN: Join us next time to hear more stories about innovative and inspirational women doing the things you'd never dream of. Or maybe you would. If you like this podcast, please share on social media or post a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show and visit our website at the story exchange.org, where you'll find news, videos and tips for entrepreneurial women. And we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at info at the story exchange dot org or follow us on Twitter at find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Bluesky. I'm Colleen DeBaise reporting by Victoria Flexner. Sound editing provided by Nusha Balyan. Production coordinator is Noel Flego. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wong. Our mixer is Pat Donahue, recorded at Cutting Room Studios in New York City.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

SUE: You're listening to 100 Years of Power...

VARIOUS VOICES: ...100 Years of Power...

COLLEEN: You're listening to 100 Years of Power from The Story Exchange, where we look to history to understand how far women have come —

SUE: — and how far we still need to go.

COLLEEN: I'm Colleen DeBaise.

SUE: And I'm Sue Williams.

COLLEEN: So let's set the scene...it's the morning of August 19, 1920, and let's pretend I haven't left home in a while. I haven't seen anyone...actually, this sort of sounds like my life these past few months!

SUE: It sounds like mine too! So it's not hard to imagine this at all...

MUSIC: 1920s band music playing

COLLEEN: So I pick up my morning newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal...Now, if something momentous had happened, I'd expect banner headlines, sort of like a few years earlier, when the Titanic sank and the coverage took up the ENTIRE PAGE.

SUE: So the papers on August 19, 1920 — that's the day after the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving 22 million American —

COLLEEN: 22 million!

SUE: — 22 million women the right to vote. It was the culmination of a decades-long battle led by some of the most famous women in our history — Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton...

PROTESTERS SOT: (chanting) We want the vote! We want the vote!

COLLEEN: Yep. Oh, there we go — I see it's on page 8 of the Wall Street Journal.

SUE: Page 8?

COLLEEN: Yep.

SUE: How about the New York Times?

COLLEEN: Well, it made the front page there — although a story about the Battle of Warsaw gets pretty much the same amount of play.

SUE: Unbelievable.

COLLEEN: What's evident in looking at the coverage — and our researcher Noël checked into how newsmen all over the country covered this story — instead of a celebratory tone, there seemed to be a lot of doubt that this “women's suffrage thing” would stick.

SUE: So this is perhaps a good segway into Part Two of our 100 Years of Power podcast.

COLLEEN: We're going to spend this episode looking at what happened after women got the vote.

SUE: If you missed Part One, check it out — we looked at the looong years leading up to 1920.

COLLEEN: Today, we’ll take you on a journey through history — the 1920s, through the Great Depression, to women’s lib in the 1970s, all the way up to the early 2000s. Stick around!

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

VICTORIA: Honestly, after talking to historians, realizing how hard these women fought for the vote...

COLLEEN: That's producer Victoria Flexner.

VICTORIA: ...it's kind of mind-blowing to think that the press covered it as if...as if it was just some minor event. An anomaly of political legislation that might not even go through.

SUSAN WARE: You know, in some ways it's discouraging that more hasn't changed.

VICTORIA: That’s Susan Ware.

WARE: I'm a historian, with a special focus on the history of feminism.

VICTORIA: Susan and I sat down to talk about what happened after 1920.

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): I hope you’re doing all right in these really strange, weird times!

WARE: Strange and weird!

COLLEEN: And what you'll hear might seem...anti-climatic.

VICTORIA: Not a lot happened for women immediately after 1920, except perhaps the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act...

COLLEEN: ...which provided federal funding for maternal and child care...

VICTORIA: ...and then the Cable Act of 1922...

COLLEEN: ...which ensured a woman would not lose her citizenship, and therefore her right to vote, if she married a foreigner.

WARE: There really weren’t that many specific laws that were passed that one could say were directly because women voters demanded them.

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): Do you think perhaps it's a fair statement to say that women had to learn how to become politically active?

WARE: I would turn that around and say, again, harking back to suffrage, how political they actually were without the vote. And they were able to mobilize through voluntary organizations, through their own groups like temperance and suffrage, and they really made a difference.

VICTORIA: And let's not forget, during the final push, suffragists even had to grapple with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

COLLEEN: Rallies and speeches were cancelled...

VICTORIA: ...but they still got it done.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

VICTORIA: So after 1920...

WARE: ...American women need to learn how to be effective voters, which is different than being political.

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): Interesting.

WARE: Men also had to learn about how, effectively, to deal with the new women voters. I think there's a learning curve for both men and women in public life in the 1920s and '30s.

VICTORIA: I asked Susan to explain the difference between voting behavior and being a politically active citizen.

WARE: Well, I vote once every two years or so, but I'm much more politically active than that — supporting organizations and reaching out to politicians as a constituent, and a whole range of political behavior.

VICTORIA: When Susan said this, it really made me stop and think.

COLLEEN: How so?

VICTORIA: Well, we’ve been so laser-focused on voting, on suffrage, on the concept of voting as a means through which women could improve their lives. But Susan’s right — being politically active is about so much more than just voting.

COLLEEN: Mm. So one might argue that — after suffrage — women now are freed up to mobilize behind other issues.

VICTORIA: That's right. And here we start to see one very famous woman leader emerge, not just on the national stage but also on the world stage.

MUSIC: Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again...

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Franklin and I had a desire to see improvements for people.

WARE: By 1932 there is a political realignment that has been going on that deposits a Democratic president in the White House, Franklin Roosevelt, who just happens to have one of the most activist and important wives as part of his team, Eleanor Roosevelt. She really helps to facilitate the entry of women into high echelons of government power.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I knew about social conditions, perhaps more than he did. But he knew about government and how you could use government to improve certain things. And I think we began to get an understanding of teamwork.

VICTORIA: The Roosevelts moved into the White House in 1933.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: But the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

WARE: You have this terrible depression, unprecedented, and a government — a federal government and state governments that decide that they need to take unprecedented action.

VICTORIA: FDR's plan, of course, is called the New Deal.

COLLEEN: One program that comes out of it is Social Security.

VICTORIA: And while FDR is generally credited as the architect of the New Deal, there were a huge number of people who worked on it behind the scenes — including Eleanor, of course.

COLLEEN: And I just want to pause for a second here to talk about this time period, and what’s going on with women in general. Even though it’s the Depression, it’s also Hollywood’s Golden Age, as people turn to movies and music for escape. We see the emergence of female artists who are still legends today. There’s sex symbols like Mae West, of course...

MAE WEST: Well, when I’m good I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.

VICTORIA: But there’s also stars like Katharine Hepburn who actually display a kind of feisty independence that might be reflective of women’s new assertiveness.

COLLEEN: This is from the 1933 movie Morning Glory, where she plays an aspiring actress.

KATHARINE HEPBURN: You know, from now on, I’m accepting no part unless I feel that I’m particularly fitted for it.

COLLEEN: That same year, we have jazz singer Billie Holiday cutting her first hit.

BILLIE HOLIDAY MUSIC: I jumped out of the frying pan, and right into the fire...

VICTORIA: And of course in the 1940s, we’ll see women stepping into a whole new set of roles, as they became involved in the war effort. But back to FDR and the New Deal.

COLLEEN: So, were there other women involved besides Eleanor?

VICTORIA: In fact, yes...

WARE: ...Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the cabinet, as Secretary of Labor. Now, she's someone that both Roosevelts have known from the end of the suffrage movement.

VICTORIA: There was also Molly Dewson...

WARE: ...a social worker turned political boss.

VICTORIA: And there was Hilda Worthington Smith, who became FDR’s education specialist.

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): In your book Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal, you write about how the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt offered “unprecedented access to power to a talented group of women who flocked to Washington in the 1930s.” Why do you think the environment in Washington in the 1930s was right for women?

WARE: A lot of the reasons why this women's network was able to work together so cohesively was that they had been working together in New York State already. They knew each other, they knew the Roosevelts, they knew how to get things done.

COLLEEN: So in part, Susan is saying that a lot of the political connections made during the suffrage movement, actually now began to pay off in D.C.?

VICTORIA: Basically, yeah. I mean, we know that a lot of politics is about connections and relationships. And though women might have been new to official political positions, they had been politic-ing since the mid-19th century.

WARE: And so because the expertise of many of these women was in the field of social welfare, they were the ones who knew how to put these programs together and how to administer them.

VICTORIA: This podcast is called “100 Years of Power,” but one thing I’ve learned in my reporting is that women had to carefully and quietly wield any newfound power, especially in the decades after suffrage passed. They were guiding the hands of men in power, rather than being in the limelight themselves.

WARE: There would often be a male head of, let's say, the Social Security Administration, and a female would be the assistant head or something. The women were quite happy to stay in the background, because to them it was just amazing that, here they were working at the highest levels of the federal government on causes that they had cared about. And also, I think they're probably savvy enough as feminists and as women to know that if they do start doing that, that there's going to be pushback from the men.

VICTORIA: Right, we’ve seen it before. Moments of great progress are always met with pushback.

WARE: Some of these pathbreaking early politicians in the 1920s and '30s, they really do have to be careful. And I would have hoped that here we are, 70 years later, that we weren't still having to tread so carefully, but everything anybody has noticed about gender — 2016, '18, what happened in 2020, it's still there.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

COLLEEN: We’ll be back after a short break.

SUE: During our breaks, we’ve been asking women to share their first voting memories. Here’s Glynda Carr of New York City. Her parents gave her jewelry for her 18th birthday, but that’s not what she remembers most.

GLYNDA CARR: My mother put me in her car and drove me down to Town Hall and registered me to vote, right. And every election until the day she died, she would call my brothers and I like, “Did you vote?” And so that’s the tradition.

SUE: Glynda’s now the founder of Higher Heights, an organization dedicated to growing Black women’s political power.

COLLEEN: Welcome back. We've been talking about what happened after women won the vote.

VICTORIA: And we've titled this episode “Slow Burn,” because I think that's what best describes the situation.

COLLEEN: Right. While we like to think that suffrage was a momentous event for women —

VICTORIA: And it was!

COLLEEN: — it just didn't change everything overnight.

VICTORIA: And that's particularly the case for Black women.

WARE: We have to remember that for most Black women, unless they lived in northern cities, they were not able to vote until 1965 and the Voting Rights Act.

COLLEEN: While the 19th Amendment in theory granted universal female suffrage — it really only did so for white women.

VICTORIA: Yes, being able to vote really depended on the color of your skin and where you were geographically. Many Southern states forced Afrian Americans to take “voter literacy” tests that were confusing and almost impossible to pass.

COLLEEN: Some listeners might have seen the 2014 movie Selma, which is based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches.

VICTORIA: There's a real-life character in the movie, Annie Lee Cooper, played by Oprah Winfrey, who was deterred from registering to vote.

COLLEEN: She famously fought back, when a white sheriff prodded and beat her with a billy club.

VICTORIA: Here's a short clip from CBS This Morning, of Oprah talking about why she was drawn to the role.

OPRAH WINFREY: All of those people, ancestors who are part of my legacy, our legacy, that keep getting up and kept trying — the fact that you go, and you’re denied, and then you go home and then you study the Constitution and you go again and you know that going, you could risk your life or have your house burn down?

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: All the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama, saying we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around!

VICTORIA: The civil rights movement ushered in a new era, another small stepping stone towards equality.

COLLEEN: The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation, at least on paper.

VICTORIA: And the next year the Voting Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in voting —

COLLEEN: — though we all know discrimination has not ended.

PROTESTERS SOT: (chanting) Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

VICTORIA: The civil rights movement also coincided with a growing women’s movement —

COLLEEN: — popularly called women’s liberation, or just women's lib.

VICTORIA: The suffrage movement is often now referred to as “first-wave feminism,” while the women’s movement is what we would now call “second-wave feminism.”

COLLEEN: And who were the women leading this new movement? The Anthonys, Stantons and Stones of their day?

VICTORIA: Well, just as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had that revelation in 1848 one day at afternoon tea, pouring out “the torrent” of her “long-accumulating discontent,” a woman named Betty Friedan did something similar when she published her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.

COLLEEN: Ah. The Feminine Mystique this was incredibly influential book.

VICTORIA: It was a total game changer. It was coming off the 1950s, when women had been taught to live in pursuit of marriage and motherhood, but they’d also been exposed to higher learning. And instead of being allowed to explore their own intellectual passions, they found themselves living lives dedicated to childrearing, casserole making and martini shaking.

COLLEEN: Well, one of those three doesn't sound too bad!

VICTORIA: Well, they were largely making the martinis for their husbands!

COLLEEN: Now I'm outraged! In all seriousness, this was when “housewifery” was repackaged as a career.

1950S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: She’s got a man she’s promised to love, honor and...
1950S COMMERCIAL ACTRESS: Keep house for the right way!
1950S COMMERCIAL ACTOR: Does that mean I’ll never have to deal with the dishes?
1950S COMMERCIAL ACTRESS: Never!

VICTORIA: Exactly. And the frustration these women felt — well, Friedan called it so famously, “the problem that has no name.” She wrote of it...

ACTRESS AS BETTY FRIEDAN: “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”

VICTORIA: Friedan’s work woke up a generation of housewives, who, though they had been given the vote, were finding that this was not quite enough. And women like, say, Shirley Chisholm began to fight for something more.

SHIRLEY CHISHOLM: And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.

COLLEEN: Shirely Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968.

VICTORIA: During her time in Congress she served on the Education and Labor Committee, the Veteran’s Affairs Committee, The House Agriculture Committee...

COLLEEN: An odd appointment for a New York congresswoman representing Brooklyn.

VICTORIA: It was a slight for sure. But she turned it around and used her time there to expand the Food Stamps Program.

COLLEEN: That's a creative way to wield power. What happened after that?

VICTORIA: Well, in 1972 she ran for president — becoming the first black major party candidate, also making her the first woman in history to ever run for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. She said of her candidacy...

SHIRLEY CHISHOLM: I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I’m equally proud of that...I am the candidate of the people of America.

VICTORIA: As so many generations of women before her have learned —

COLLEEN: — and so many generations of women are still learning —

VICTORIA: — her time had not yet come. She later said of her candidacy, “I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”

COLLEEN: So, let's review. We've talked about the New Deal, civil rights...now we're getting up to the 1970s.

VICTORIA: Drumroll...

COLLEEN: Let's talk about the Equal Rights Amendment.

VICTORIA: This was the cornerstone of the women’s movement, a proposed amendment to the Constitution designed to end unequal legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment...

COLLEEN: And which member of the women’s movement wrote the ERA?

VICTORIA: None of them. It was actually written by Alice Paul!

COLLEEN: Wow, the suffragist?

VICTORIA: Yup, our first-wave feminist suffragist Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.

COLLEEN: Huh.

VICTORIA: But it wasn’t until the women’s movement picked up momentum in the ’60s that the ERA became this sort of touchstone piece of legislation designed to give true equality to men and women.

MARTHA GRIFFITHS: That is exactly what the Equal Rights Amendment would do.

VICTORIA: And that is the late Martha Griffiths, a Congresswoman from Michigan who re-introduced the bill in 1971, after it had floundered in legislative purgatory for 48 years. In this 1974 conversation with the U.S. Information Service she explains what the bill will do.

GRIFFITHS: What it will really do is to force governments, when they make a law or pass legislation or whatever they may do, to make it apply equally to both sexes. They can not discriminate on the basis of sex alone.

VICTORIA: Griffths goes on to say that the bill will be ratified, likely in 1975.

COLLEEN: But that didn't happen.

VICTORIA: Nope. Despite epic efforts by the National Organization of Women —

COLLEEN: — and support from iconic activists like Gloria Steinem —

VICTORIA: — there was a sizeable contingent of women fighting against the ERA...Enter Phyllis Schlafly: lawyer, author, and conservative activist extraordinaire.

COLLEEN: Here’s a clip from the public affairs show Firing Line in 1973.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: We find as we look into the matter that ERA won’t give women anything which they haven’t already got or have a way of getting.

WARE: I mean, nobody can match Phyllis Schlafly. She knew how to get things done and she knew how to play the media, and can you imagine if she had been a man? I mean —

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): She would've been president.

WARE: Yes, I think she probably would've.

VICTORIA: She organized housewives across the nation to pressure their elected officials to vote against the ERA because she believed it would destroy the very core of what she believed female identity was.

COLLEEN: Some listeners might know her story from the new FX series Mrs. America, where she’s played by Cate Blanchett.

WARE: It's hard to know what really gets people motivated to be politically active and then to be good at it; and then what — why certain people end up going one route and other women end up going another route.

COLLEEN: It reminds me of the women who fought against suffrage.

VICTORIA: It does. And it's hard for me, as a person who did not grow up during these times, to understand why women throughout history wouldn't want equal rights.

GINA LAURIA WALKER: Because women are isolated, they are lonely, they know they are alone, and they're kind of scared of everything, including themselves and their shadows.

VICTORIA: That’s Gina Lauria Walker.

LAURIA WALKER: I'm professor of Women's Studies at the New School in New York.

VICTORIA: She’s also the director of The New Historia, an initiative committed to uncovering women of the past who produced knowledge...

LAURIA WALKER: ...and incorporating this new knowledge into literally a new history.

VICTORIA: Full disclosure, I studied with Professor Walker at The New School.

LAURIA WALKER: There are women who are determined to figure out how to move the collective of women forward, but that is so hard because women are so divided.

VICTORIA (FROM ZOOM): Yeah.

LAURIA WALKER: They're divided by all the things that divide men.

COLLEEN: Because women, as a group, are just as diverse; just as complicated.

VICTORIA: And ultimately Phyllis Schlafly and her followers defeated the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing it would force women into combat, legalize gay marriage, abortion and destroy traditional gender roles. If we’re talking about how women in America have wielded power — well, this is one hell of an example. Schlafly proved women had political power, even if it’s not necessarily the kind progressive power that some had envisioned.

COLLEEN: Where does the ERA stand today?

VICTORIA: Well, states had until 1982 to ratify it — so that date has come and gone. But in recent years with the rise of Me Too and now fourth-wave feminism, there have been renewed efforts. Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, and Virginia just a couple months ago in January..so I guess the fight continues.

COLLEEN: But even if the ERA did not pass, there were still specific grievances that could be addressed.

VICTORIA: Coming up, we cruise into the 1980s and the big bang in women's entrepreneurship.

COLLEEN: Stick around.

COMMERCIAL: The Story Exchange is a nonprofit media company that provides inspiration and information for women entrepreneurs. If you like what you’re hearing, check out Episode One, about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, featuring historian Ellen DuBois. It’s Episode One: Battle for Suffrage.

COLLEN: Welcome back!

NELL MERLINO: We were still at that point in the ’80s, still proving that we could do this shit!

COLLEEN: That is Nell Merlino.

VICTORIA: Oh, I like her already.

MERLINO: It was not a given that we could run companies or be on the Supreme Court or any of that.

COLLEEN: Nell is perhaps best known for...

MERLINO: ...the creation of Take Your Daughters to Work Day with Gloria Steinem at the Ms. Foundation in the 1990s.

COLLEEN: I first interviewed Nell years ago back when I was a business reporter at Dow Jones...

COLLEEN (FROM ZOOM): ...around 2005, which I think is around when I met you, because I think that's when you were probably —

MERLINO: Make Mine a Million. Absolutely.

COLLEEN: Nell created a long-running program called Make Mine a Million Dollar Business...

MERLINO: ...which challenged women with microbusinesses to grow them to million dollar enterprises.

SOT: MERLINO RINGING BELL AT NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE

COLLEEN: That's Nell, ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in 2011.

VICTORIA: If you could see a video of this, you'd see a sign behind Nell that reads, “Women-Owned Businesses — Creating Jobs — Fueling the Economy.”

MERLINO: A lot of these businesses started at home. They were opportunities to increase your freedom and to set your own boundaries, as opposed to constantly trying to fit yourself into a model that was never designed for women — and particularly not designed for women who were caring for children or parents.

COLLEEN (FROM ZOOM): You're talking about the corporate model.

MERLINO: The corporate model, or the factory model.

COLLEEN: So Nell has seen women take control of their lives — and their finances — by starting their own businesses — often home-based businesses.

MERLINO: We are so reminded of it again with everybody at home working, cooking, everything; everything is happening in the house. But it is what drove a lot of women to start businesses, because at least everything was in one place, which was the house.

COLLEEN: Of course, to start your own business — well, really to grow it — you need capital.

VICTORIA: Like a line of credit or a bank loan.

COLLEEN: Exactly. And for women — and this is hard for me to wrap my head around — even in the 1970s it was impossible for women to get a credit card in their own names...which leads us to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.

MERLINO: That was national, that was Lindy Boggs. I want to say Bella was on there...

VICTORIA: ...Bella Abzug, a Congresswoman from New York, sponsored the bill.

COLLEEN: The story — and it's a good one — is that Lindy Boggs, who filled her husband's seat in the House of Representatives after he died in a plane crash, had sort of this genteel Southern charm.

VICTORIA: She was from Louisiana.

COLLEEN: And when the House Banking Committee was considering a version of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which would make it illegal for creditors to discriminate based on race and other factors, she noticed that “sex or marital status” wasn't included. So she hand-wrote it in, and gently suggested that the omission “must have been an oversight.”

VICTORIA: It passed — and President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law.

COLLEEN: Around that time, the National Association of Women Business Owners — or NAWBO — formed and began lobbying around a new cause.

MERLINO: There were logical progressions in this whole movement. They then move on to do H.R.5050, in 1980 or '88.

VICTORIA: And this was a big one. H.R.5050 was also called the Women's Business Ownership Act.

COLLEEN: It eliminated state laws requiring women business owners to have their husband or any male relative cosign a bank loan.

VICTORIA: A witness during the H.R.5050 hearings testified that she didn't have a husband, brother or living father available, so she had to have her 17-year-old son cosign the loan, because in the eyes of the government HE was more responsible by virtue of being male. I mean, this was the 1980s!

COLLEEN: NAWBO has called H.R.5050 the “big bang” of women's entrepreneurship.

COLLEEN (FROM ZOOM): And I wanted to ask if you agree with that — is that how you viewed it? How significant was it?

MERLINO: I think it's significant in that women, they were now being included in conversations that we had not been before. I think it was — I think a lot of it was cosmetic, but what we know now is all the research about: if you can see yourself — if you can see it, you can be it. I think that was incredibly important in terms of the recognition. Think about this time, this is when Sandra Day O'Connor pops up. You were starting to see this inevitable — I'm going to call it appreciation for the expanded role that women were playing in everything.

COLLEEN: Since that legislation passed, it's probably no coincidence that the number of women-owned businesses has grown at incredible speed.

VICTORIA: The most recent estimate, pre-Corona, is that there are almost 12 million firms owned by women.

COLLEEN: That's about one-third of all U.S. small businesses. Though we should note here — while there has been this progress — the very issue that Nell set out to address a few years back, about women entrepreneurs not making as much in revenue as men, is still an issue. If you zoom in on million-dollar businesses in the U.S. — if you take a look at say, five of them — only one would be owned by a woman.

VICTORIA: So — and I ask this as a millennial, who has always seen women working, and success stories like Arianna Huffington or Tory Burch — why is this still an issue?

COLLEEN: Well, part of it is that we're just starting to see a proliferation of role models for young women to emulate. That wasn't there for previous generations — maybe there was Oprah, we all love Oprah — but there simply weren't very many super-successful women in business. And then we still see issues that haven't been addressed through major legislation, that would help women — say, the government providing paid maternity or family leave.

MERLINO: I want to just pick the right words — but there continues to be this notion still of having to do everything. I think we're seeing it again writ large with what people are coping with at home at the moment. What's interesting now, though, is that fathers are being forced in the same situation because many of them can't go out either. So that has set up an interesting dynamic. But historically it was us who ended up in these situations. We don't make as much money because we have a lot to do.

COLLEEN: And then, last but not least...there is still a disturbing lack of access to capital for women business owners.

MERLINO: The boys — not all of them, but most of them — still lend to each other.

COLLEEN: Today — perhaps a little differently than 30 years ago — we see this most painfully in the venture capital arena. So we're talking high-growth startups. There's about $100 billion dollars in VC given out each year — only 2-3% goes to women-led teams.

VICTORIA: So that probably impacts women in tech the most.

COLLEEN: That's right. But I asked Nell about this, as I know that lack of access to capital can hamper the growth of women-owned business across a broad swath of industries — and that directly affects women's ability to control wealth. She once told the New York Times that women's economic independence “is the missing piece in the evolution of equal rights.”

COLLEEN (FROM ZOOM): Can you tell me what you meant by that?

MERLINO: Literally that we are not in the same rooms still when the big contracts are being whacked up. I would be very curious with the trillion dollars in stimulus, how much went to women owned companies, how much went into the hands of women at a level that would refinance or help them pivot businesses? We still see the old boys network come up in situations like that. Even though Nancy Pelosi is deciding on it, systemically, we haven't gone far enough in terms of making sure that women are in the places where the money's being doled out.

COLLEEN: So let's close this episode out on a positive note...

SUE: ...by looking at some other “firsts” that women achieved in the latter part of the 20th century.

VICTORIA: There's Sandra Day O’Connor, who becomes the first female Supreme Court Justice in 1981.

SUE: Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first female vice-presidential nominee for a major political party in 1984.

VICTORIA: Janet Reno — the first female Attorney General in 1993.

COLLEEN: Madeline Albright — the first female Secretary of State in 1997.

SUE: But it wasn’t until this millenium that a woman would reach the highest position of political power yet — spoiler alert, it wasn't Hillary Clinton.

VICTORIA: It was Nancy Pelosi, who in 2007 became the first female speaker of the House of Representatives. Meaning she’s the most powerful individual in Congress, and after the Vice President, she’s next in line for the presidency.

COLLEEN: Looking at these dates — I mean they’re all so recent — I asked Nell Merlino...

COLLEEN (FROM ZOOM): When you say the pace, do you think it's moving quickly or at a snail's pace?

MERLINO: I think it's both. My grandmothers were the first women in my family to vote. And the difference between my life and theirs is just unbelievable in terms of my health, my wealth, my mobility — mobility both in terms of revenue, but also all the places I've been around the world. What has happened? The opportunities that have been afforded women over the past 100 years are staggering. It's being able to step back and see both how long it takes and how quickly some things turnover.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

WARE: I think whatever politically active women are doing today is really standing on the shoulders of the suffragists.

VICTORIA: Here's Susan Ware again.

WARE: And yet, a lot has changed. As a historian, what's been so rewarding for me is telling these stories of what women have contributed, and then trying to share them so that people today, they know that they're not the first women to have tried this, and that there are lessons that can be learned — good and bad lessons — but that they're part of a larger history. And I find it a very empowering history, thinking about being part of this larger trajectory.

COLLEEN: Vic, I know you got a little emotional during that interview.

WARE: Don't start crying! (laughter)

VICTORIA: I did. Because there’s something quite moving about situating yourself in this grand narrative of women’s history. Understanding that your life experience is shaped by the efforts of the women who came before you — women who fought for every privilege and right that you have. Women you will never know, but who have changed your life.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

COLLEEN: Next week in the final episode of this special series...

SUE: ...we take a look at the women who are taking up the mantle.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Hello Bronx and Queens, my name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

VICTORIA: A new generation of women taking us into the future.

MUSIC: Madame Gandhi, “The Future is Female”

OUTRO: This has been a special project from The Story Exchange, a nonprofit media company that provides inspiration and information for women entrepreneurs. If you liked this podcast, please share on social media or post a review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. And visit our website at TheStoryExchange.org, where you’ll find news, videos and tips for women business owners. And we’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at info@thestoryexchange.org — or find us on Facebook. I'm Colleen DeBaise. This episode was produced and reported by Victoria Flexner and myself. Sound editing provided by Christina Kelly and Nusha Balyan. Archival research done by Noël Flego. Special thanks to our voice over talent: Kathleen Murphy. Our mixer is Pat Donohue at String & Can. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wang. Our thanks to Madame Gandhi for so generously allowing us to use “The Future is Female” as our theme song. The song “Near Light,” performed by Ólafur Arnalds, is courtesy of Erased Tapes Records and Kobalt Songs Music Publishing. Archival clips come from the New York City Municipal Archives, Creative Commons and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.