And they reigned over all things, animal, vegetable or mineral, in their kitchens. Yes, they wielded authority over their young children. Their lives were hard, and they were more or less powerless. I suspect that some of those Yankee matriarchs might have employed their knives symbolically and cathartically, with enthusiasm that suggests more than a good cook’s culinary caution. Many witty conceits or tempting tropes have their dark undersides else we would not snidely snicker.Ĭonsider the lives of those women, my foremothers, Yankee farm wives and their spinster sisters in the still-familiar chains, however well padded or plated, of patriarchy. Thinking as a feminist of what I know of their specific lives and, in general, about women’s lives in Puritan New England, I cannot refrain from reading into the cucumber cutting a symbolic circumcision, ritually related, perhaps, to the exorcism of chronic bitterness against patriarchal oppression. As those women stood peeling and chopping in their kitchens, they were legitimately, albeit situationally, armed with sharp and dangerous weapons. On my mother’s side, I come from a long line of Yankee matriarchs with roots in Oakham, Massachusetts, the little town in the Brookfields settled by my mother’s maternal ancestors. Imagine what the lowly cucumber might have signified to generations of women, aproned and weary at their kitchen counters. Look at them! They invariably suggest to the viewer specific male anatomy. Little green cuke of the pickle variety or giant of the salad genre, there they are.
Let’s consider the lowly cucumber, the cuke, certainly an obvious, even comical, example of a phallic symbol if ever a fruit reared a penile head. As I do so, years of reading and teaching about the suggestive power of language, the epistemology of meaning and metaphor, prompt me to approach the cucumber ritual more analytically, being inherently incapable of regarding anything, especially something as suggestive as a cucumber, as simply what it is. Late-life Musings of an Unapologetic Feministīefore my mother peeled a cucumber, she sliced off the ends, one at a time, then rubbed the cut ends against the remaining cuke to “draw the bitterness out.” I never questioned the importance of this step to this day, I ritually massage the cut ends before I apply the peeler.
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