Jell-O Girls: A Family History

In this intimate and intriguing debut memoir, Rowbottom explores the lives of the women in her family, specifically her mother and grandmother, members of the family that once owned the Jell-O company. She evaluates 100-plus years of Jell-O’s marketing campaigns through a feminist lens, exploring how Jell-O presented itself as a quick and easy dessert solution for white, middle-class women who, at the turn of the century, found themselves alone in the kitchen without “maids and nannies and cooks.” Rowbottom describes Jell-O’s early campaigns (“Teaching women, it turns out, was a tenet of Jell-O’s marketing... Jell-O, so pliable, so good, teaching them how to mold themselves to match it, pliable and good”) and provides a history of food’s role in the American imagination—including the low-calorie-food trend and later ad campaigns that sold Jell-O based on nostalgia. At the same time, Rowbottom explores how the women in her own family negotiated the social constructs of the times and within the family business: her grandmother Midge gave up her own aspirations to write when she had children; later, her mother Mary’s health complaints were ignored and dismissed as “hysterical” by doctors, resulting in a late cancer diagnosis. Throughout, Rowbottom asserts that a curse afflicted her family: “The curse was patriarchy.” Though Rowbottom’s focus on the “curse” sometimes distracts from the narrative, her memoir offers a fascinating feminist history of both a company and a family. (July)