When it comes to novel adaptations, most readers I know fall into one of two camps: they either refuse to watch them, or they can hardly wait. The first group wishes to preserve the written form of the story in their minds, uncorrupted by anyone else’s vision, while the second is more open. Like parents of multiple children, their hearts simply expand to include the completely new but related work of art.

Personally, I teeter on the fence between these camps. I usually end up watching the screen adaptations of books I read because I just can’t resist—even though I’m not a relaxed, open-minded viewer, but an uptight and wary one, unable to watch without keeping a running tally of the differences between the adaptation and the book. Sure, I understand that the adaptation will necessarily diverge from the book in ways that I might not like. It might even diverge in ways that I truly love. And yet, I can’t help hoping it won’t, at all.

The new Apple TV+ adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry was no exception to the rule. I’m one of the many readers who loved Bonnie Garmus’s novel and its heroine, Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant research chemist and the reluctant, revolutionary star of Supper at Six, the most popular cooking show in Garmus’s mid-century America.

If you’re wondering if Lessons in Chemistry is “just like” the book, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s not. Not entirely.

But I loved what they did with it. Mostly. Maybe you will, too.

In some ways, the series is even more enjoyable than the book—like the setting, for example. As with Mad Men, Lessons in Chemistry captures America as it was in the 1950s and 60s. The clothes! The hair! The billboards! The cars! The furniture! I could watch it all again with the sound turned off and be completely entertained.

The casting and acting is also superb, in my humble opinion. Most of the actors faithfully represent the characters created by Garmus, complete with their mannerisms, personalities, and motivations. Brie Larson, as Elizabeth, is just as beautiful, brilliant, and matter-of-fact as she is on the page. Her daughter, Madeline (Alice Halsey), is as adorable and precocious. Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) is perhaps a little more handsome than his print counterpart (not that I’m complaining). Kevin Sussman is pitch-perfect as Elizabeth’s producer, the diffident, hapless, and goodhearted Walter. And Rainn Wilson as the vile TV studio executive, Phil Lebensmal? Inspired.

The screenwriters also did an admirable job of capturing the complexity of the plot without sacrificing clarity or pacing. I’m not surprised that they found it necessary to simplify some of the storylines and conflate some of the characters; Elizabeth’s storyline is only one of many intersecting narrative arcs in the novel, and all of the book’s supporting characters are well-developed with complex backstories and perspectives. I was generally pleased with how much they managed to pack in.

Without spoiling too much for my fellow readers and viewers, I’ll say the love story between Elizabeth and Calvin—their progression from enemies to lab partners to soulmates—is just as emotionally satisfying as it is in the novel, and as well informed by their individually traumatic histories. Madeline’s search for the truth about her father makes it on to the screen, and her findings line up exactly with those in the novel. Calvin’s friendship with the Reverend Wakely, and a slightly less provocative version of his spiritual journey, makes the cut, too. And I absolutely loved how they chose to represent the storyline of Six-Thirty, the Goldendoodle voiced by BJ Novak.

Really, there were only two characters, and storylines, that I had mixed feelings about.

I’ll begin with the one that was simply a disappointment: Fran Frask. In the novel, she is a “too cheerful, wide-bottomed secretary,” who later gets fired by her (young, idiotic, male) supervisor for gaining weight. She also gets dumped by her boyfriend for a younger, thinner, less sexually experienced woman. At the ripe old age of 33 in the 1960s, she’s basically destined for spinsterhood. We can’t blame her for bitterly resenting Elizabeth, who has the relationship and the professional success she so desires for herself, though we can (and do) judge her for openly sabotaging Elizabeth’s career. We expect the pair to be lifelong enemies, but instead, they bond over a shared trauma and become allies.

I loved this character, and this friendship, and I was so looking forward to seeing a fat actress in a leading role that at least wasn’t entirely about her weight. But as so often happens, Hollywood had other plans: the role of Fran Frask was given to the wonderfully talented—and very thin—Stephanie Koenig. Moreover, her friendship with Elizabeth doesn’t come out of a meaningful shared experience but a casual conversation in the grocery store. Fran doesn’t grow as a person beyond (gasp!) learning to ask a man out rather than waiting for him to ask her. I wish they had fleshed out this character a bit more (pardon the pun).

The other, completely transformed character is Harriet Sloane, and my feelings on this are much more complicated.

On screen, Harriet (Aja Naomi King) is the mother of two young, adorable children. She is raising them solo while her husband, a surgeon, serves his country overseas. Harriet is an engaged and loving mother, always ready to gleefully chase her children around the lawn. She also manages to keep her lovely home looking perfect at all times, even though she works full-time, has a robust social life, and is deeply committed to her community. She loves her life and is grateful for it—but she is also secretly unhappy because she is capable of so much more. She has always wanted to become a lawyer but has dutifully put herself last, a distant second to her husband and children.

Essentially, this Harriet Sloane is the sort of woman we’re all supposed to want to be. She’s the yardstick against which we’re meant to measure ourselves and then rap our own knuckles with when we inevitably fall short. Frankly, I would feel nothing but annoyed by this “new and improved” version of Harriet Sloane if her story didn’t also diverge from the original text. But it does, in a deeply meaningful and moving way.

On screen, the fictional Californian suburb where Elizabeth lives, just across the street from Harriet, becomes the historic black community of Sugar Hill, and Harriet gains a storyline drawn directly from history. She wages a campaign against the Santa Monica Freeway, which is—spoiler alert—doomed from the start. In print, the cast of characters is entirely white, which seems like an oversight given the themes of the book. After all, Elizabeth is a chemist who wants to discover abiogenesis (the singular origin of all life on earth) and thereby prove the inherent equality of all human beings. She wants to end discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or any other congenital characteristic simply by proving that there is no scientific basis for it. Adding the grim, historical context of racism to Elizabeth’s quest strengthens the entire story, in that it complicates it, or tempers it, in a way that I find interesting.

For someone so attuned to sex discrimination, Elizabeth is painfully oblivious to her own privilege—as were, and are, so many white feminists—so, on screen, Harriet helps her see it. She also helps Elizabeth reframe some of the things she sees as disadvantages (her beauty, her gender, the cooking show she has been forced to host in lieu of a chemistry career) as huge opportunities, levers she should pull on if she truly wants to fight for gender and racial equity. This Harriet makes Elizabeth a better, more self-aware person, and a stronger ally. I love all of this.

And yet, my heart breaks, more than a little, for the original Harriet Sloane.

In the novel, Harriet is not an ideal woman but an invisible one. She is precisely the sort of woman we’re told to avoid becoming, by any means necessary, for as long as we can: a “large gray-haired woman in a rayon dress and thick brown socks.” Trapped in a lonely marriage and virtually abandoned by her four adult children, this Harriet has never worked outside the home or ever daydreamed about furthering her education—her favorite publication is Reader’s Digest because it cuts “big boring books down to a chewable size like St. Joseph aspirin.”

When Elizabeth is told to target her cooking show to the “average housewife,” she’s outraged. She takes the phrase as an insult to her viewership, which it is. The word “average” is essentially a pejorative in our toxic achievement culture, while the term “housewife” is a rudely dismissive term that reflects the dismally low value placed on domestic labor. But the thing is, the Harriet Sloane we meet on the page is an average housewife, in the best, most literal sense of the word “average.” She’s “midway between extremes”—neither old nor young, pretty or ugly, wealthy or poor. She’s not “out of the ordinary”; rather, she is deeply ordinary. She’s so unremarkable from the outside that her own family barely notices her. Even Elizabeth, who later becomes her best friend, fails to really see her for years, despite living across the street from her.

After just a few minutes in Harriet’s presence, though, Elizabeth respects the older woman, and recognizes her as someone from whom she can learn, not despite her age but because of it. Harriet, Elizabeth muses, is someone she can turn to for “actual wisdom. How to get on with the business at hand. How to survive.”

The meaning of their friendship in the novel, as I understood it, is that the invisible woman—the average, middle-aged housewife—is worth seeing. Not because she’s secretly extraordinary, but because ordinary women are just as worthy of appreciation as extraordinary ones. We shouldn’t depreciate as we age, like cars. Our value should be stable because, as Elizabeth herself insists, we are all ultimately equal in value, all made of the same stuff. We’re all just a bunch of atoms, arranged in different ways.

I was really looking forward to seeing an everywoman share the limelight with a superwoman, not just stand in her shadow, as is usually the case. So, you can imagine my disappointment when the older, average woman, the Harriet I knew and loved, was instead completely written off, replaced with a younger, more attractive, more accomplished woman. I guess, as Phil Lebensmal puts it in the book, most “people don’t want to see themselves on TV. They want to see the people they’ll never be.”

Even so, I’m glad to have known both Harriets. I feel all the richer for having spent time thinking about, feeling my way through, and learning from both the book and the movie.

And I think I’m almost ready to get off the fence. The next time one of my favorite reads is adapted, I’ll be on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn and a more open mind.

Every single mother I’ve ever met is the same. In romance novels, I mean. It’s almost as though the authors are working from a shared set of ideas about how a single mother must look and behave in order to earn the bliss of a new relationship.

For starters, she must have just one unplanned pregnancy, in her late teens or early twenties (when her judgement is understandably clouded by hormones). When she discovers that the father (her first love) lacks the maturity to support his child, emotionally or financially, she does not have more children with him. She certainly does not proceed to procreate with another, similarly irresponsible person or (good heavens!) a string of such unsuitable mates.

No, even the most morally conservative readers can forgive this woman her “mistake” because she does not repeat it. Besides, such judgement just seems churlish given how quickly, thoroughly, and solely she accepts the consequences of her, um, action.

She is an engaged, loving parent and breadwinner from the start. She does not leave her child in the full-time care of someone else while she finishes her education, embarks upon her career, backpacks through Europe, or does anything else she had planned for her youth. She either struggles to finish her formal education with a newborn in tow (like Jess Davis in The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren) or else stoically gives up her dreams and pursues paid work that meets the constraints of her new life as a single mother.

She definitely does not rely upon the government or anyone else for the primary source of her income. She may have a little support, such as council housing (like Jess Thomas in One Plus One by Jojo Moyes) or an inherited family business (like Claire Sutherland in Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake). If she’s really lucky, she’s got a friend or some family who help out with childcare.

But she works for her own money in addition to raising her child. Her age-mates, and we the readers, are all suitably impressed by her work ethic, if also a little worried about how sustainable it is. We imagine ourselves trying to do it, and it feels impossible… because it is invariably presented as practically impossible.

The employment supporting her small family hovers somewhere between slightly unstable and extremely precarious. Claire Sutherland “scrimps and saves” to afford her home as well as invest in remodeling the family bookstore, which is hardly a guaranteed money-maker, in this (or any) economy. Jess Davis is a freelance statistician, forever hustling for clients because she knows the loss of just one contract will destroy her delicate finances. Jess Thomas, by far the least fortunate of the three mothers, runs a cleaning business with a friend by day and tends bar by night, but still can’t quite make ends meet.

Moreover, each single mother’s hold upon her just-barely-sufficient income is tenuous because balancing a job with solo parenting is so difficult. This is such an important, defining reality of her life, we learn it right after her name. The Soulmate Equation opens with Jess Davis staring at herself in a public bathroom mirror, thinking about a presentation she gave while wearing her daughter’s sparkly barrettes clipped to her blazer. She envies the immaculately dressed and made-up woman standing next to her—a woman who “probably didn’t have to change outfits after cleaning glitter off a cat and a seven-year-old.” So, we see she’s struggling, but in a cute, palatable way.

As is Claire. She’s at the bar with a friend when we meet her, downing an extra glass of wine because her daughter is spending the night with her ex for the first time in years. Most nights, she is so worn out from running the bookstore while also helping her daughter “navigate the particular kind of hell that [is] fifth-grade friendships” that she “collaps[es] into bed every night around ten.”

Is every single mom romance the tale of a young, gorgeous martyr with one adorable, biological child, who must constantly struggle?

And finally, rather further along the spectrum of single-motherhood-induced suffering, there’s Jess Thomas. In chapter one, we find her spending the few moments she has between her day and night shifts checking in on her intellectually gifted daughter and her stepson, a bullied, gentle, teenaged goth who smokes too much weed. The children are home alone together in her worn-down-but-clean house, as they will be all evening. She wishes she could stay home with them to parentally insulate them from the social ills of their neighborhood, but she must work just to keep their cruddy roof overhead.

Ostensibly, the overwhelming combination of gainful employment and solo parenting is why these single mothers don’t date. When her best friend insists that she should—because she’s still young and attractive enough for casual sex—both Jesses and Claire claim they are too busy or too tired. But really, each one is worried about allowing another person into her life who might break her child’s heart.

A good single mother always, always puts her kid’s heart before her own—even though, of course, she does secretly long for a life partner. Not just to share her bed, or the crushingly heavy responsibility of her household, but to witness the living wonder that is her child.

Jess, Jess, and Claire each have one daughter, and each girl is a precocious, healthy, all around “good kid”—a testament to the excellence of her single parenting. (As we all know, everything about a child, from her appearance to her behavior, reflects directly back upon her mother, and that goes double for single moms, so of course these girls are adorable and generally well-behaved. If they weren’t, they’d torpedo their mothers’ chances of finding a new mate, as opposed to help her attract a good one.)

Because each girl is the lemonade her mother has squeezed out of the lemon (the child’s irresponsible, absent father), the experience of raising her alone is a bittersweet one, at best. She takes so much joy in her daughter, in her achievements and abilities, but it is always adulterated by sadness and yearning. If only she had a decent co-parent to share in these delights, they would be fully sweet… but no, the potential risk to her child’s well-being is just too great.

Maybe she’ll treat herself to a one-night stand, but a good mother does not go out actively looking for a serious relationship. Readers, let us all take a moment to silently contemplate her self-sacrifice, the definitive characteristic of exemplary single motherhood.

But of course, she does meet someone. Just, you know, organically, while going about her regular, intensely challenging day-to-day life as a single mom. Her initial attraction to this person is strengthened, or else her initial dislike of this person is overcome, when they help her out of a tricky, kid-related situation she can’t quite handle on her own. When Claire’s daughter Ruby shows up to a wedding brunch in casual clothes, having refused to don the fancy dress she was supposed to wear, Claire is mortified. She doesn’t know what to do, so she just stands there, blushing adorably. Luckily, love-interest Delilah is there to make some impromptu modifications to the dress, much to Ruby’s delight and Claire’s relief.

When Jess Davis finds herself unable to be in two places at once and has no one else to call (a classic single parent conundrum), her handsome-but-standoffish potential beau swings by the school to pick up her kid and take her to a dance class.

And Jess Thomas? The beat-up car she “borrows” from her ex breaks down on a very long trip to a mathlete competition that could change her daughter’s life. Guess who happens to be driving by in his immaculate luxury sedan? He’ll take it from here. Jess is a terrible driver, forever missing her turns and getting lost. Such an endearing, feminine failing in a generally capable woman. Sigh.

As the events of their novels unfold, Jess, Jess, and Claire fall head over heels in lust with their respective partners, while also worrying about the potential impact of their increasingly serious romantic attachment upon their offspring. They all feel appropriately guilty about forming a relationship with a fellow adult, and carefully refer to their crush as a “friend.”

Ultimately, though, each potential mate displays genuine affection and ability to care for the child, should the relationship get that far, and these moments are what finally allow her to feel, then openly acknowledge, her love. Claire melts while watching Delilah teach her daughter about fine art photography. Jess Davis swoons while watching River help her daughter with an intricate school project. Ed not only gets Jess’s daughter to the math competition on time but gets her everything she needs to succeed. He also shows up for Jess’s stepson by giving him an artistic outlet for his angst and by helping him deal with the bullies.

Such moments underscore their partners’ fine character—clearly, anyone who is willing to bond with a child who is not theirs biologically is a noble human being, worthy of love. But also, these sweet scenes offer these single mothers a glimpse of what their lives might be like as partnered parents. They’re falling in love with the person, yes.

But also, we can’t blame them for also falling in love with the idea of no longer struggling on alone. They have done so, valiantly, for long enough, haven’t they? They have earned it, the sexy and romantic solution to the exhausting problem of their single parenthood. Partnered parenting is clearly easier and therefore better, provided you choose the right person to do it with, which she has. Huzzah!

To be fair, I’ve only mentioned three single mom romance novels—the only three, actually, that I’ve ever read. And enjoyed reading, for that matter, right up until I started thinking about how much they had in common. I began to wonder: is every single mom romance the tale of a young, gorgeous martyr with one adorable, biological child, who must constantly struggle, independently, to remain sane and solvent until she is rescued by a sexy-yet-stable mate who also loves her kid? Because if that’s the case, I have a serious bone to pick with this subgenre.

I don’t disagree with the depiction of single motherhood as difficult, because of course it is. The struggle is real, and it’s intersectional. (Incidentally, the heroines of these three novels are all young, white, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive.)

The problem I have with the struggling single mom trope is that her situation is presented as both heroic and inevitable. Why do we admire single mothers for accomplishing, alone, the work of two parents (which by the way, used to be done by an entire village)? Why don’t we help her instead? By that I mean, why are there so few resources available for single mothers, and why is there so much stigma involved?

These are questions that single mothers—that all of us, really—should be asking. I’m not suggesting that romance novels are the right venue for this discussion, but by presenting the status quo in this appealing, entertaining way, they do help to reinforce it. As readers, we accept the protagonist’s view of her situation. Jess, Jess, and Claire don’t interrogate the fact that they live in a society which allows an unmarried father to take zero financial responsibility for the child but expects the mother to bear it all, along with the caregiving responsibilities, unless he deigns to participate.

Their willingness to unconditionally accept this bizarre double standard, to struggle along without expressing resentment, is part of what makes these women such sympathetic characters. Bitterness is such an unattractive quality. You attract more flies with honey than vinegar, they say.

Readers of single mom romances need to both like and pity the struggling single mom—without feeling any indignation or obligation to help her out—because our role is stand back and applaud as her love interest swoops in to do just that.

This is really the heart of my beef with this trope. Given that a single mother’s problem is largely socioeconomic, I believe it deserves a socioeconomic solution—a radical rethinking, perhaps, of the patriarchal, capitalist systems which have put her in the precarious situation of working full-time to support her family, in an unstable field, that just barely fits around her full-time caregiving responsibilities. But nope. Not in these novels, anyway. She just needs to fall in love.

Now, I’m not opposed to romance. I wouldn’t read these books if I were. But I just can’t accept falling in love with another person as an appropriate solution for all of a single mom’s practical and financial difficulties. Jess Thomas “borrows” a bunch of money from the wealthy cleaning client she later falls in love with, and later accepts his financial assistance on the trip to the mathlete competition, but only because her daughter needs the academic opportunity so badly. They almost break up when he discovers her theft, but he forgives her because it happened long before they got together.

In perhaps the most egregious example, Jess Davis gets paid to date her man, in the interest of building buzz around his science-based dating app before it goes public. But it’s not prostitution, because the contract specifies that she’s not obligated to sleep with him… and again, she’s doing it for her child. She just lost a big freelance contract by taking the moral high ground and refusing to distort her data. She needs the money, for groceries and dance class fees. Kids are expensive. At the close of the novel, River tells her he’s buying a big house. She, her daughter, and her grandparents will all go live there with him. One big, happy, ultra-wealthy family.

Only Claire, who falls in love with a young female artist (who therefore has her own financial difficulties) escapes this particular resolution. Delilah does directly contribute to Claire’s business with a grand romantic gesture; she installs some of her fine art photography in the bookstore as a surprise, a way of declaring her love.

But even though Delilah’s career is on the upswing at the end of the novel, it’s obvious that her role in Claire’s future is an emotionally supportive life partner, as opposed to a benefactor. Which is all Claire really needs and wants, because Ruby’s father also grows up and meaningfully supports his daughter, by the end. They’re all in it together, now. Which is just… lovely. Full stop.

On the whole, though, I can’t help feeling that the struggling single mom trope does us all a great disservice. It encourages single mothers to keep wistfully longing for an attractive mate to wander into our difficult lives and make them easier, and encourages unhappy married mothers to stay married rather than accept the risks of independence.

However, as all mothers who have been both single and married well know, the idea that coupledom is unilaterally superior to singledom is a radical oversimplification—romance is a form of fantasy, after all. Co-parenting is easier than single parenting in some ways, but harder in others, no matter how much you love the one you’re with. Jess and River’s story, for example, ends before they move in together and start fighting over whose turn it is to stay home when Juno gets sick.

The single mom romance I want to read stars a woman who is genuinely happy and at ease in her life—and not because she’s thin, beautiful, young, and independently wealthy. Maybe she’s none of the above, but she and her children are just fine all the same. They have found a way to work around the systemic barriers to their socioeconomic security—or maybe the story is set in the future, when we all get equal pay for equal work, and caring for young children has once again been taken up by the village. She isn’t secretly yearning for a romantic relationship; maybe she even actively does not want one—not because she’s worried about the impact of her love life on her offspring, but because she likes her life just the way it is.

And then she meets someone, hilarity and sexy times ensue, and their happily ever after does not involve marriage, or even cohabitation and co-parenting.

Dear readers, does such a book exist? I sincerely hope so, because it’s the one I want to read next.

Every day around five o’clock, my eldest daughter asks me a question. It’s the same question every day, but I can’t seem to answer it without first skulking into the kitchen, peering into the fridge, and berating myself for having forgotten to defrost that pound of ground beef.

The answer is eggs. Again. As I pull a bowl out of the cupboard and set it next to the stove, I hear Martha Rosler’s voice in my head. “Bowl,” she says. She pronounces the word firmly and clearly, without a trace of emotion; it’s exactly the tone of voice I might use if I were trying to teach the word to a dog. She often speaks to me this way when I’m in the kitchen, and every time, it makes me smile.

Martha Rosler recorded Semiotics of the Kitchen, a six-minute performance art piece, in 1975. Several years ago, someone posted it on YouTube, without the artist’s permission but much to her amusement and satisfaction. The film begins with a tight closeup on Rosler, who is in her early thirties but looks younger. She is wearing a black turtleneck and pants, her long, wavy hair parted in the middle.

As the camera pulls back, we see that she is standing behind a small wooden table covered in cooking implements, with a refrigerator and stove behind her. She gazes directly into the camera with a neutral expression, then proceeds to name contents of her kitchen while demonstrating their uses, in alphabetical order and with increasingly aggressive body movements. “Apron,” she says, while tying it on. Moments later she stabs at the air with a fork, drives an ice pick into the table, and flings the invisible contents of a ladle over her shoulder. My personal favorite is the hamburger press, which she repeatedly opens and snaps shut, like an alligator’s jaws.

The first time I watched it, I laughed out loud, with delight and recognition. I could see my own attitude toward cooking in her performance, of course, but also, she reminded me of a fictional character I had just met in Bonnie Garmus’s 2022 novel Lessons in Chemistry. The novel is set in the early 1960s, and the protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, is a brilliant chemist who is forced out of her field by her openly sexist colleagues. To support herself and her young daughter, she accepts a job hosting a cooking show for a local television station, but much to the consternation of upper management, uses the platform to teach her audience of “average housewives” about chemistry.

There are many similarities between Semiotics of the Kitchen and Elizabeth Zott’s show, Supper at Six. Both are filmed in black and white, and set in home kitchens, albeit with different aesthetic and production values. Rosler’s film was shot with a single camera in a small, basic kitchen, while Zott’s show is taped in a professional studio.

The set is carefully designed to mimic a contemporary middle-class suburban kitchen, crowded with signifiers of the owner’s adherence to traditional values and domestic pursuits: an open sewing basket sits near a toaster covered in a knitted pink cozy, and a needlepoint on the wall asks us to “Bless this House.” The view from the window is fake, and the clock does not tell time. In the pilot episode, Zott describes the set as “revolting,” and later invites the studio audience to come and take any items they want. “I like having room to work,” she says. “It reinforces the idea that the work you and I are about to do is important.”

Like Rosler, Zott also refuses to use domestic implements “properly” while smiling for the camera and wearing a pretty, figure-flattering dress. Rather than acting like the “sexy-wife-loving-mother” that the cretin in charge is expecting, she takes her task, and her audience, seriously. “Cooking is chemistry,” she says, and her intention in teaching women the basic laws of chemistry, the “real rules that govern the physical world,” is to reveal the inherent equality of the sexes.

All humans are simply a bunch of atoms, in her view, as are all forms of life on Earth. This notion that men are superior to women, however widely accepted, has no basis in scientific fact, and therefore, her audience does not need to accept it as true. They can simply toss it out, along with all of its implications about what women can or should do with their lives. “Use the laws of chemistry,” she says, in the final episode of her show, “and change the status quo.”

In Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler relies on body language, rather than explicit dialogue, to convey a similar point of view. When she gets to “X” in the alphabet, she takes the fork and knife and crosses them in front of her body, as though she is refusing to continue playing her part, or rejecting everything she has just shown us. Then she flings her arms up and outward, tilts her head back, and says “Y.” Her tone is as flat and declarative as ever, yet the syllable rings with meaning for the individual viewer; I hear it as both a defiant question and an expression of despair.

Finally, she writes the letter Z in the air with her knife, a gesture made famous by Zorro, as though she is aligning herself with the vigilante and his commitment to defending the victims of political oppression. Unlike Zorro, however, Rosler does not need to mask her identity because she is not a member of the privileged class, fighting on behalf of the oppressed; she is one of the oppressed, boldly inciting rebellion—not with violence, but with art.

In an interview with Stephanie Murg for Pin-Up, Rosler explains her film as a reaction to the way “haute cuisine” had been transferred from hired professionals onto the women at the head of the household. The idea that “because we don’t have servants any more in the middle classes, women were supposed to be able to make something very special and also, of course, entertain and sit down and eat it with the guests… I thought that was pretty crazy—and also pretty un-thought-through.”

She laughs while delivering this line, as did I when I read it, though my amusement was tinged with more than a little bitterness. That “crazy” idea had some serious legs. They’re still kicking us now, almost 50 years after Rosler was inspired to make Semiotics of the Kitchen.

They just kick us more quietly, now, under the table, instead of out in the open. It is no longer considered acceptable to tell someone who identifies as a woman that she belongs in the kitchen. However, it is acceptable to pay her less in the workforce. To avoid subsidizing childcare, and to degrade it as an “unskilled” profession, resulting in precious few, pricey options.

It is justifiable to penalize her for taking time “off” for motherhood, to deny her advancement opportunities because her choice to bear or adopt a child is proof that she is not sufficiently committed to her profession. And if she insists on sticking around despite these barriers, to then erode what’s left of her commitment by demoralizing her, not with sexist remarks but in more subtle ways that pass under the radar of HR.

Bonnie Garmus wrote her novel in the hours left over from her day job. In conversation with Cindy Burnett on the Thoughts from a Page podcast, Garmus reveals that she wrote the first chapter while fuming about a particularly “bad day” at work. She had had “one of those meetings” in which she was the only woman in the room, presenting ideas for which no one expressed much enthusiasm—until a man essentially repeated everything she had said. It’s an experience “a lot of women” have had, she tells Burnett, with a little laugh, “but that day I was just so mad.” Rightly so.

As a woman, I feel seen and empowered while reading Lessons in Chemistry and watching Semiotics of the Kitchen. They validate all the frustration I felt, years ago, when I was a young mother who had given up her job after the birth of her second child. They tell me I was right to rage against the patriarchal systems that had me stuck in the kitchen, making and eating three meals a day with two small children while my husband went out for lunch and then to the pub after work.

I had always planned on returning to work when our daughters were both enrolled full-time in school, at which point I would insist on a redivision of cooking responsibilities. He actually liked to cook, and I much preferred doing the dishes. Finally, I thought, the kitchen would become neutral territory, and not the battlefield I stormed across daily, grinding a trail of Cheerios into dust with a toddler wrapped around my waist.

That might have come to pass, in time. But we never really got the chance to find out.

My husband died when our youngest daughter was still in kindergarten. Suddenly, I was alone in the kitchen again, and would remain there for the foreseeable future—not because of the absurd gender norms that continue to pervade our society, but because I was the only one capable of using the stove. I no longer had the option to hang up my apron as planned, to walk off the job after years of resentfully dutiful, largely thankless service.

All I could do was tie it back on. The next four years passed in a blur of hastily prepared dinners: chicken nuggets, tacos, spaghetti, scrambled eggs. In that time, my daughters grew up, and grew aware of my hatred for cooking, without really understanding it. I made no attempt at hiding it, nor did I attempt to explain it, apart from pointing at my impatience and ineptitude for all the discrete tasks involved in making meals.

My oldest is twelve now, and nearly my height. She can reach over the stove and into the microwave with ease. My youngest is nine and a total pro at operating our cranky old toaster. It’s well past time for me to stop thinking solely in terms of what they’ll eat for dinner and instead about the ideas I’m feeding them, about the task of cooking at home.

Rosler and Garmus are thinking about the next generation of home cooks, too. I believe Rosler uses the alphabet not just because it’s a fun structural device, but because it’s the place we begin in teaching our children to read. It’s never too early to begin teaching them about the cultural norms surrounding cooking so that they become capable of questioning ones that conflict with what they know to be true about their own abilities and interests. They must become aware of these norms in order to reject ones that do not fit with their own values.

Both of my daughters enjoy watching cooking and baking videos on YouTube, perhaps because the meals and baked goods I produce are so basic. I allow this because it feels like a reasonably harmless option considering what else they could be watching. However, in the years to come, I need them to become capable of noticing, for example, how many of these content creators identify as women. I want them to ponder the evolution of Rosler’s “crazy” idea, that somehow, for some women, it no longer feels like enough to produce and serve a very special dish, to herself and her guests, in her own home; she must now document the process for the edification of total strangers who wish to do the same.

After that, she must place her creation within an artful tablescape, photograph it from all angles, and then post it on her socials, in hopes of attracting likes, subscribes, and comments. If she doesn’t take all these extra steps, that special dish would just… feed her family. And they’d probably complain about it.

Of course, I’m not going to get through to them with this sort of talk; if there’s one thing I know, from having been a kid and raising two of my own, is that the more stridently critical I am of things they enjoy, the more committed they become to those things. Maybe what I should do instead is infiltrate their YouTube accounts while they’re at school and watch Semiotics of the Kitchen a dozen more times, so it pops up in between all the cake-decorating videos. It’s worth a shot, right?

I’m kidding, of course. I’m going to take a page out of Lessons in Chemistry instead. Elizabeth Zott ends every episode of her cooking show by saying, “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.” In giving children a role to play in the nightly meal, Zott is showing them that they can contribute, as all members of a household should, and that their role is not tied to their gender but to their individual capacity.

She is helping them to see their mother as a person, as opposed to a food-production machine. From there, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to realizing that maybe she has other things to do or think about besides making their dinner—but that she did it anyway, which deserves a little appreciation.

Even if it’s scrambled eggs. Again.