For those of you who don’t know, I’m a massive foodie. I will happily spend an entire day poncing around making dinner from scratch for my friends (including sugar-coating rose petals for Rose Martinis. Helpful hint: overdo it and they glue to saucers, never to come off). I was the only person at school who wanted to take Home Economics at A Level, with the result that it didn’t run so I had to do Chemistry instead, which is just Maths Cookery anyway *ducks*.

So, I love food, food prep and all things kitchen related. Yet there’s a Bad Reputation (geddit?) between women, feminism and kitchens, and I’d like to talk about that. Not just in the wake of the Great British Bake Off, either.

Women’s Lib, to coin an old phrase, has been linked to the rise of labour saving household appliances, yet it’s a fact that women do most of the shopping and cooking, probably because whilst we’ve made great leaps forward in terms of being able to vote and not being treated as the property of husbands, there’s still a massive social expectation around looking after the home. Separate Spheres for the 21st century.

Now, on a practical front, this means that it’s women who are often in control of what a family eats, what a family thinks about food. This can be both a good and bad thing. This setup means that many families understand a “woman’s role” as one which involves spending time feeding and looking after them, and whilst it’s great to be the nurturing one, the one who can make the AMAZING pie, the one who keeps the place feeling like a home. It’s less great to be that person because you are female. And that’s the problem.

The kitchen is the centre of a lot of families and households. Control of the kitchen means control over a lot more than that. Women are, whether they realise it or not, at the very centre of what kinds of food we eat and hence the sort that is offered, produced and sold. Realistically, the entire industry of FMCG products – and the potential for increasingly environmentally friendly products, fair trade products, and organic products – is supported by the habits of women when they go to the store.

In short – women can make a huge amount of difference to the world by leveraging their role as consumer. And this is where the feminist bit comes in. It’s not about consigning the entire role of “homemaker” to the bin of 1950s retro parties and relief over how we’re not Betty Draper. It’s about using the history of women in the home, women cooks, our mums and grandmothers, to think about (and act upon) a new tradition of taking charge and getting on.

My gran taught me how to cook. She also taught me many other things about making my own way in the world, which included a damn good shortcrust pastry.

Wooden spoons at the ready? Here we go.

First up, and an easy starting point are some big name women cooks. From Mrs Beeton through to Delia and Nigella, these are women who have helped shape how we think about food, our homes and ourselves.

They’ve even helped us understand more about countries and cultures beyond the UK and Europe – food being an excellent and tasty way of enjoying a bit of intercultural sharing. In the 70s, Madhur Jaffrey’s travel-diaries mixed recipes with vignettes on where the food was found, who made it and interesting titbits of stories on Indian culture. More recently, Harumi Kurihara has given us access into the world of Japanese home cooking.

Next up, we can look at women’s roles in the kitchen in connection with the economy. The recent waves of recession after recession have seen a rise in cost of living with a corresponding reactive change in shopping habits as women revolt every day against the high cost of food prices by changing where they buy things and what is being cooked and eaten in the home. The fact that the cuts fall more heavily upon women, and that the burden of dealing with households with lower incomes also falls into the pockets of female aprons, has led many women to become increasingly political.

The revolution begins in the kitchen. Bake for victory!

The connection between politics at home and the wider political world is not a new thing.  Many food awareness and food movements have been driven by women, such as the aptly named Kitchen Revolution and the almost too awesome to exist Isa Chandra Moskowitz who heads up the Post Punk Kitchen a refreshing mind-spin for anyone who thinks vegan cooking is about boring mung beans. The memory of her peanut butter and chocolate cookies are making my mouth water right now.

I’m going to close by saying that I really believe that teaching everyone to cook, to know where food comes from and the value of properly sourced, sustainable food products is part of the feminist movement. The power of the kitchen is not something to be set aside in the belief that we are letting down the sisterhood by being chained to the oven. Instead, we can help make a much better world by getting everyone involved.

And yes, you can lick the spoon afterwards.

I firmly believe that craft is a feminist issue. On a personal level, it’s amazing that every time I pick up my needles and what essentially amounts to a bit of string, I am connecting with women across thousands of years, as well as those in my life now; my aunt taught me to knit, my grandma taught me to crochet and another friend encouraged me to learn to embroider. I can take something made two hundred years ago and give it a modern spin. As someone who likes being artistic, but was never very good at traditional ‘art’, craft allows me to express myself.

Yet I know that I am different from my grandma, her mother and so on. I do not make things out of financial necessity or to ensure that my family is clothed – it is often significantly cheaper to go out and buy a pair of socks or a jumper than what it costs to buy yarn or fabric, not to mention how long it takes to make something. And that’s where feminism comes in: I make things because I can. Because knitting or sewing something gives me satisfaction. Because of the struggle of women before me and changes that they brought to society, I am not eternally pregnant or chained to a kitchen sink- I have free time, something that women didn’t have much of. I have disposable income… if I want a £20 ball of yarn or some amazing threads, I can have them and I can make something utterly frivolous with them if I so choose, too. At the moment, I am stitching tea towels with birds and bugs from Victorian natural history drawings to sell at a local craft fair. One of the joys of having a skill is seeing how you can use it to interpret it. Want to cross stitch Judge Judy? Go for it!

I see no coincidence in the fact that me learning to knit and becoming a feminist are linked. My first knitting book was Stitch and Bitch by Debbie Stoller, which lead me to read Bust magazine. Although I had always been brought up to think like a feminist, I was now, in my early twenties, becoming an active feminist. I wanted to learn more about my place in the world and how I could make that better. And I know that it’s the same for a lot of women. Crafting is a gateway to this. (That’s not to say I think all crafting is feminist. I think a lot of it is packaging traditional ideas of women in twee, Cath Kidston-esque clothing, trying to make money off the back of all things ‘vintage’. Solution to this: just read the blogs you like and do your own thing. As always, be discerning in your crafting!) Because of my love of all things textile, I learned to be a better person and became braver in defending what I believe in. Yes, I do get ‘old lady’ jibes, but those tend to come from the misogynist idiot I happen to share a staffroom with. And I usually come back with that there’s nothing wrong in being an old lady, if it makes me happy. After all, I don’t tell him how to live his life.

There are loads of plus sides to having a skill- I can make clothes that fit and flatter me, rather than being dictated to as to what shops think I should wear- I have a collection of really cool shawls and socks that are perfect for me. Vogue may say that an orange, cabled hoodie is so 2006, but if I want one, I can make one. I also have the satisfaction that I know that if the world ends/zombies take over/the second Ice Age cometh, I will have plenty of knit wear and pretty things to make life bearable, should I survive. On a more down-to-earth note, I also know that gifts I give are unique and that they haven’t been made by toddlers in a sweatshop. I know where every stitch has come from and I’m sticking two thumbs up at what capitalism says I should do (although this means that I have to start making Christmas presents insanely early in the year, due to my over-achieving nature.)

There was an article in the Huffington Post recently decrying the fact that ‘tough gals’ in feminism no longer exist, and crafting (specifically knitting) was listed as one of the activities that was not considered ‘tough’. I consider myself relatively streetwise – I grew up in inner city Leeds, went to a very difficult school and had by no means a privileged time growing up. But because I knit, I am not, apparently, tough. I think that women are re-embracing crafting because we live in a world where so much is out of our control- the world is not going to become a better place overnight and women are still marginalised in some areas of everyday life. So it is natural to want to take control somewhere, whether that is mastering the perfect satin stitch or being really good at motorcycle maintenance. Your mileage (and activity of choice) may vary.

• Stephanie is a teacher by day, and a writer/crafter/blogger by night. She’s a young old lady who lives by the sea, reads voraciously and drinks a heck of a lot of tea. Her latest project, Ladies In Monochrome, is an online archive of ‘lost’ or forgotten vintage photographs of women sourced from flea markets and antique shops. All the images in this post are her own work.

Let me tell you about it. It is a simplified, reasonably accurate version of a four-stroke engine, and it comes with its very own Haynes manual. It’s also entirely plastic and aimed at ages 10+. Bollocks, I say. If I had kids that age, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near the thing with their wickedly sharp craft knives. They’d have their fingers off before the first tea break.

The Haynes model internal combustion engine. Like Airfix, only not.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago, I decided that I was going to learn about engines. I’ve always been a bit hazy on the theory behind internal combustion, and despite my father’s repeated attempts to explain, I’ve never really been able to get it straight in my head. This could have something to do with his insistence on explaining over the dinner table, rather than opening up the bonnet of his car and explaining there. (My brother got the lecture over the open bonnet of the car. He got so bored he fell asleep.)

This will all be a lot easier to grasp if I can actually do it myself. If I can take apart an engine and put it back together, you can be reasonably certain that I’ll know how it works afterwards. OK, maybe I’ll explode the back garden a couple of times, but I’ve accepted that as an inevitable consequence.

Miraculously, my new-found zeal is shared by a colleague of mine. She, too, wants to strip down an engine and see what makes it tick. Excellent! We ordered a plastic model to assemble in order to get a vague idea of what it will all involve, before thinking about taking things a little further. While we waited for the model to arrive, we may have become a little… unruly. Rowdy. Noisy. Obnoxious? Surely not!

After one of our exchanges, a colleague came up to me. She works in HR. You know the type: perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect smile. Was my enthusiasm too, er, enthusiastic?

“I just wanted to say, what you’re doing is fantastic,” she murmured quietly, and straightened the strand of pearls at her neck. “I love my car, I’d kill any fucker who so much as touched it. There’s nothing quite like a good engine purring, you know?”

I didn’t know, actually, but I nodded just the same.

The next day, another colleague was delivering some papers over my lunch hour when she saw the driving lessons website open in my browser. “Oh, are you learning to drive? Good for you! I learned in Nairobi, I thought I’d be quite frightened and sedate but it turned out I was a real girl racer, I nearly failed because I was speeding the entire time…”

I’m guessing that speeding will not be encouraged in London.

The next day, colleague Y came up to me, very upset, and drew me away from my desk. “I heard that you and colleague X are rebuilding an engine!” she said, looking very upset. Well, yes. Was this against her ethical beliefs? Was I in trouble with the ‘cycle to work’ initiative?

“Why didn’t you invite me?”

The thing is, I haven’t really mentioned this that much at work, despite being giddy with it for months. The people that have found out about it have either nodded sagely about how many times I’ll set myself on fire, or raved about how brilliant it all is. Invariably, my young female colleagues have fallen into the latter category. They’ve also taken the opportunity to ask me what I thought about the new Pagani (undecided, and I miss the Zonda R), the One-77 (I do like it, but why is it so angry? It looks like it’s been munching on stray pets) and plus, wouldn’t it be nice if the off-road vehicles didn’t kill your spine every time you went off road? (Seriously, Toyota, sort it out.) All of this was delivered in hushed tones over the tea and coffee, and by the time we were back at our desks we were very firmly back on either the Sudan referendum or the receptionist’s new hairstyle.

The Aston Martin One-77: Gratuitous car!porn. Image from CarzTune.com

Why? Was what we were talking about so shocking that it wasn’t fit for general consumption? Would the office spontaneously explode if it turned out that the female accountants and aid workers in my organisation actually knew their Nissans from their Nobles? Why did they get so embarrassed talking about it?

“Well,” colleague X said philosophically, “I didn’t get into cars before because I thought that it was a traditional male thing. And that didn’t mean that I couldn’t do it, but blokes would know more about it than me starting off, and I didn’t want to feel stupid. Then it turned out that they knew just as little as I did.”

Two hours later, a male colleague decided to ask condescendingly what kind of engine we’d be rebuilding. Would it be, he said, sneering, a rotating one?

“A Wankel rotary?” I asked. No. It would be a four-stroke.

• Look out for more Secret Diaries as Vik continues her engine adventure…