# Women and Bread

The dough is stuck to my hand. It is stuck to the board. It is stuck to the counter beneath the board. I am scraping and kneading and folding and pulling and feeling some tension in the air between my partner and I and feeling some thread tugging back through generations. I am not a woman but I am doing what so many women before me, in my ancestry and beyond, have done:

Make bread.

Specifically, make a flatbread dough, make it too wet, and try to make it better. I added too much water and turned a 30% hydrtion dough into a 80% hydration dough. It's not working out how I wanted and my partner is overtired after a long day at work and use of food as peacekeeping is gooped all over my hand.

How many women have made flatbreads? How many women have made flatbreads for their partner? How many women, women before woman was a concept, women before flatbreads were a concept, when this was just "bread", have made flatbreads for socially close individuals? How mamy of them decided to cook the dough as is – too wet – and how many added more flour, as I'm doing now?

It's making me think about gender rolws, social roles, sex (assigned and otherwise), gender (assigned and otherwise), and how they are all distinct yet overlapping categories. I was listening to "Don't Touch My Hair" by Emma Dabiri recently, a book about Black hair through the past few hundred years and what it has signified, and from that have added another book to my growing TBR pile: "The Invention of Women" by Oyeronke Oyewumi (Orèrónkẹ  Oyěwùmí). In fact, as I write this I have downloaded a PDF of it. Some of the discussion in Emma Dabiri's book is mingling with other material I've read and is being kneaded in the second-hand stand mixer of my brain into something of an understanding of the creation of gender and gender roles. There's so much more to learn.

How many non-women have made flatbreads? How many "women" who made flatbreads would have not been women if they had a chance? How many would have chosen to be not-women for access to greater or different rights and responsibilities, and would any of them have still chosen to be not-women if they could have the desired rights and responsibilities as women? How many men have made flatbreads for loved ones as the best way of being women that they knew (and how many cared for loved ones through food as men)? The behaviour of gender roles, the performance of gender, the identification with one label or another – again, overlapping but distinct concepts. Can there be sex without sex roles, gender without gendered acts? Can making flatbread for your partner ever be a truly gender-neutral acr, or will it always be tied into the history of one type of people assigned one type of role involving caring for another type of people? Wives making dinner for their husbands (women making food for men ((two distinct but ove
rlapping categories))? People making food for people immersed in the sauce of expectations and assignations and rules and reputations and the weight of history and the struggle for equality.

That's a complex sauce. Maybe something like a curry. Touches on "the personal is political".

I added more flour to the dough and kneaded it enough that when fried it went crispy. My partner took some alone time and came back calmer, the tension gone. I piled my flatbread with leftover refried beans and cheese; they smeared theirs with hot sauce. We took a nap on the sofa and the hands of history continued kneading.