at a time when early feminist politics were challenging entrenched gender roles, including women’s identification with the labour of the kitchen, madeleine kamman was celebrating women’s cooking in an attempt to preserve the standards of a rich and varied culinary tradition, and to elevate the status of such work as performed by women in the home. as a professional chef and restaurateur, she also argued for the status of women in the professional kitchen: "i took a stand", she says, "on women in the professional kitchen before women’s lib came into the picture...i had transcended the limits imposed on women by generations of professional chefs and found myself succeeding in a so-called male profession." she believed by the 1990s that the next generation would see as many women as men reaching the top.