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"It was to take your life in your own hands," Shapiro says. "You have a home and a family, if you're going to cook, get your hands in the food and do something good. You don't have to hand this over. Betty Friedan's big message was 'stand up and take charge of your life, it's yours.' And Julia said the exact same thing about food and about the meals you feed your family."
Even as food television progressed into the modern era, with skinny young things chopping and churning, and sass sometimes more important than substance, Child, who died in 2004 two days short of her 92nd birthday, kept her message constant. During an appearance on Martha Stewart's Christmas show, Child and her host both made croque-en-bouche, a traditional French pastry shaped like a Christmas tree.
"The one Martha made looked like she'd collaborated with Euclid," says Geoffrey Drummond, who was Child's executive producer throughout the 1990s. "Julia's looked like the leaning tower of croque-en-bouche. I didn't think about it at the time. Julia could make a perfect croque-en-bouche. But she wanted to show that it didn't have to be."
Child was an outspoken champion of women's causes. She did dozens of fundraisers for Planned Parenthood, and when she underwent a mastectomy in 1968 she was open and public about it, helping to dispel stigma of breast cancer.
In the cooking world, she made it her mission to get women into professional kitchens. She famously took on the Culinary Institute of America, berating the institution for not enrolling enough women, and she regularly kept tabs on the progress of women in the industry.
"Julia always considered herself a feminist. Always. But not in a fundamentalist sort of way," says biographer Spitz, whose book will cap what is being called the JC100, a 100-day celebration of Child's life that includes celebrity-hosted dinners, blogger tributes, readings and other events around the country. "When she got to the states and ate in restaurants, she would march into the kitchen and say, 'How many women are in here?' She would tell the great chefs, 'You need more women here.'"
But others say such a label is limiting. Sara Moulton, Food Network host and longtime executive chef of the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, was one of the young women Child took under her wing. Child arranged an apprenticeship for Moulton in a prestigious restaurant in France, where in addition to working in the kitchen -- where she was not allowed to touch the stove -- Moulton says the chef used to chase her around the wine cellar. Child's response when Moulton related the unsavory tales: "Oh dearie, what'd you expect? They're all like that. Get over it."
"What I really understood from Julia Child was that if you really, really want something, you shouldn't let anything get in your way," Moulton says. "I don't really think it's feminism. She would have given the same message to a man. She was willing to go into a man's world and cook this food that women weren't cooking. She's a role model."
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Online:
JC100: http://www.facebook.com/juliachild
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