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In 1933, Eugénie Brazier earned three Michelin stars for both of her restaurants—she was the first person to claim these high accolades and the only woman to ever do so. Brazier’s rise to fame helped establish Lyon’s place as the gastronomic capital of France, but it did not ensure that women would continue to lead the way in professional kitchens. Women are celebrated home cooks and guardians of French cuisine, but they have largely failed to achieve the same recognition for their craft in the professional kitchen. The small number of women who have succeeded in the culinary arts are celebrated as exceptions. This book looks at the historical and contemporary reasons for the underrepresentation of women in culinary professions in France, a country where cuisine is considered an important cultural form. It considers the strategies that women use to enter and move ahead in what is often a hostile work environment where gender inequality persists. The author explores the realities of women who cook professionally through their own culinary education and apprenticeship as well as extensive interviews with female and male cooks, chefs, and journalists. Lyon serves as a rich field site for discovering women’s resilience, skill and challenges as they seek to make their mark in the culinary arts.

Building upon historic transnational connections between the cosmopolitan port of Tampico, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the Mexican north, and ports of entry across the Atlantic, a network of labor activists including women such as Caritina Piña emerged in the early twentieth century to address labor inequities. This book retraces the emergence of this network circulating on the eve of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The early revolutionary period ushered in a wave of anarcho-syndicalist groups privileging organizing via labor unions and other collectives. Organizations such as the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) were among the most progressive of collectives that incorporated women’s issues in their agenda. Its members encouraged women’s participation as compañeras, key to creating a real revolution. Yet, despite such progressive stance, gendered ideas about femininity and masculinity shaped members’ perspectives just as much as they shaped mainstream media outlets casting radical female activists as “women of ill-repute.” Their own understanding of gender and ideas about motherhood shaped women activists too. While anarcho-syndicalism declined as the revolutionary state grew stronger in its co-opting of organized labor, the legacy of women’s activism remained a distinctive feature of the greater Mexican borderlands. Women left an indelible mark on the Tamaulipas-Texas borderlands’ labor history. Such historic and gendered border solidarities, while imperfect, helped to build a foundation for postrevolutionary labor alliances.