Recently I made bread from scratch for the first time, and I experienced a moment of sheer sensual pleasure and universal connectedness. It was more than just kneading dough, it was a momentary bond to women who spent years serving family from the kitchen.

I fondly remember my dear home-economics teacher who laboriously taught us the principles of muffins and cookies. I can remember thinking at the time that I wouldn't really need to know this stuff—it's not like I planned on cooking for a living. Perhaps somewhere slumbering in my adolescent mind was the idea that I would someday have a personal chef thereby eliminating the necessary burgeoning cooking talents of a blossoming seventh grader.

What I accomplished in successfully baking bread was no small feat I can assure you. On any given day I can walk a mile in Manolos, gracefully endure a bikini wax and find the last size 4 on any sale rack. But I feel like I finally crossed an elusive frontier into womanhood this time, proudly displaying a loaf of rosemary-olive bread.

We live in a society where nearly everything, including grocery shopping, can be done by phone or with the click of a mouse. Sure we cook, but we cook low-fat, Asian fusion dishes with tofu, soy and organic produce. We even take pants to the dry cleaners to be hemmed instead of picking up a needle and thread. With conveniences like pre-sliced bread, mass produced/marketed clothes, Butterball turkey hotlines, preservative-filled jams and prepackaged microwave cookies, there is simply no need to be creatively frugal like our grandmothers were.

I took a small step for womankind and a big step for Juli, but a step in what direction?

While my bread cooled on the rack and the house filled with the scent reminiscent of bakeries of yesteryears, I thought of other things I could do that women for generations past have done out of necessity and women of my generation have simply abandoned or now do for pleasure—sewing for example.

I recently read an article in a women's magazine entitled, "Knitting is the new black," implying that stylish women have taken comfort in craftiness with yarn. It's as if the women who tightly grasp the corporate ladder have done a 180-degree turn and loosened their grip enough to make returning to the home somehow fashionable. But for some reason I doubt we'll soon see Brazilian beauty Gisele Bundchen crocheting on the cover of Vogue.

So does my making bread qualify me as a fashionista on the threshold of a new style trend? I hardly think so.

But, could my newly discovered comfort in the kitchen be a step back toward what Simone de Beauvoir thought a trap for women: the kitchen? According to Dr. Peg Brand, a women's studies professor at Indiana University, "de Beauvoir despised the home and homemaking wifely activities because she saw that has the physical space of oppression. That was the trap, the cage that women were confined to." I've heard others imply that this movement to return to the home is 'revolution in reverse.' Could it be, by watching my dough rise, I have taken part in stalling the progress women have made?

Have I ensnared my gender back into a 'homebody' type role by adorning an apron? If I have, at least I'm doing it fashionably. I will absolutely make bread again (that is until I get my personal chef), for dinner parties, potlucks and maybe, just maybe, one of the days where I need to feel the dough between my fingers to feel connected.

In the end, it's just a loaf of bread.

Copyright © 2002 Juli Strader. All Rights Reserved.

Juli lives in Toronto, Canada.