Domesticated Drummond

The images above are from a Food Network show, The Pioneer Woman. If you watch the Food Network you know that with every chef that has their own show we learn a bit about them and their home life. In Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, the star chef in this show, allows viewers to really step into her life and see how she lives on her ranch in Oklahoma. Drummond has four kids and a husband, which is pictured above. In Ree's back story she shows that she is the typical mother that would have been idolized in the empire that Amy Kaplan writes about. Kaplan writes about a phrase "imperial isolation" which Kaplan defines as "whereby the mother gains symbolic sovereignty at the cost of with drawl from the outside world."(29). In The Pioneer Woman, we see that depicted very well. While her husband is children are out working the ranch she stays inside and cooks all of their meals and sometimes she even cooks for their church on Sundays. The most we ever see Ree leave her designated cooking space is when she has to go to the grocery store or when she is allowed to go outside to take pictures of her family when their jobs of working the ranch also includes them working their cattle that they own. What we see on The Pioneer Woman are examples of how domestication and femininity go hand and hand even in today's society. In the first few episodes we learned that Ree went to college in Los Angeles and then went out to Chicago for law school but when she met her "hunky" farmer husband she gave that all up to be a product of a "domesticated woman". Her show portrays how she is something of a household pet to her husband and only when under his command she is allowed to do something or anything for that matter. This is an accurate depiction of how even today we still find woman to be something that we domesticate and with drawl them from society.