The Women Historical Fiction Forgets

SOME WOMEN’S STORIES demand patience. I have learned this over the years through my research on food history and pouring over women’s letters, draft manuscripts, and clipped recipes. And not all of their stories are equally accessible. The papers of the most prominent are digitized—readily available and easily searchable—but some women’s stories are left sitting in basement boxes for 80 years. Bringing them to light makes for a messy slog of archival work absent of clear triumphs or tragedies.

Halfway through a PhD in American history, I was reminded of this lesson anew. Whenever I emerged from the scattered documents to attend a dinner party or the like, people had one reaction to my research: Have you read Lessons in Chemistry? I was apparently late to the party. Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a novel about a chemist-turned-television-cook in the 1960s who overcomes sexism through genius, wit, and sheer willpower, had by that point already become an Apple TV+ show and a TikTok sensation. It offers a woman’s story engineered for satisfaction: a brilliant protagonist who outsmarts every obstacle, transforms daytime television into feminist pedagogy, and always gets the last word. It is the kind of women’s history we love to tell—uplifting, clear-cut, cathartic—and I hated it.

A few months ago, I finally picked up my half-read copy of Lessons in Chemistry and finished Elizabeth Zott’s story. I do understand the appeal. As the novel’s protagonist, Zott is everything modern feminism wants in a hero: she is a woman in STEM, smart, principled, and relentlessly determined. Lessons in Chemistry is the ultimate escapist girlboss fantasy: a world that works hard to feel historical, but where brilliance and tenacity triumph over structural inequality. Zott, it imagines, is all midcentury women needed: someone to break the glass ceiling and show them the way.

So, what should we do with the women who didn’t have that kind of power? Or who did but weren’t magically free? What about the women who were brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking yet still found themselves constrained by the expectations of their time? What do we lose when we swap out complex, incomplete, historical lives for fictional ones that manage to transcend all odds? How can we ask audiences to pay attention to women not half as impressive as the ones we can dream up today?

Lessons in Chemistry is the ultimate escapist girlboss fantasy: a world that works hard to feel historical, but where brilliance and tenacity triumph over structural inequality.

There is a famous quote attributed to feminist scholar and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich that underscores the slippage between our expectations for women and the historical realities they often faced: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” This line, rescued from one of her academic monographs, now adorns mugs, tea towels, and tote bags as a third-wave feminist rallying cry to make trouble and make history. But Ulrich originally meant the opposite: that we must attend to the lives of women who were well behaved and disappeared because of it. From their stories, we can more fully reckon with the pressures and limitations women have faced and face still.

As I read Zott’s narrative, I kept returning to a woman I had gotten to know through some of those scattered basement boxes. Caroline Maddocks Beard—a food writer once known to Chicago Tribune readers as “Jane Eddington”—is now largely forgotten. However, from 1910 to 1930, Maddocks Beard’s daily cookery column brought her into hundreds of thousands of midwestern homes. She was a major draw for both subscribers and advertisers, and Tribune marketing materials emphasized her expertise. The Tribune even sent her around the world for two years, attending various cooking schools and learning new techniques to bring back to her readers.

You start to feel like you know someone after reading thousands of pages of their writing. It is easy to overlook your own hand in pulling a narrative out of piles and piles of unordered documents. I dissected Maddocks Beard’s college notebooks, column typescripts, and scrapbook upon scrapbook of the food prices she used to piece together her weekly menus. I stumbled upon her marriage certificate, divorce papers, strings of letters between her and her ex-husband—insights into the dissolution of a marriage unable to sustain the tension of a female breadwinner.

In these fragments, I watched Maddocks Beard seek work as a serious writer but remain relegated to the women’s pages, where she spent her whole career writing under a pseudonym. Once, a publisher solicited a book manuscript from her, only to pass on the project when the manuscript was completed. Out of this story I pieced together, I felt angry on her behalf. I wanted better for her; I wanted her story to end differently.

Like Zott with her TV show, Maddocks Beard attained a level of mainstream success rare for a woman of her time. Both women constantly chafed at the boundaries of what their respective success allowed, but unlike Zott, there was no secretive donor coming to save Maddocks Beard’s career in the final chapters. There was only what was contained in those boxes.

Despite whatever success it attained or value it offered viewers, Zott’s television career is regarded as a disappointment—or worse, a betrayal of her true scientific calling—by Zott, her precocious daughter, and her friends. The novel itself reinforces this message by comparison to Zott’s closest real-life analogue, Julia Child. Child is alluded to with disdain in the book’s opening as a “good-natured [chef] gleefully tipping back the sherry,” making “delicate soufflés.” We are assured that Zott’s show was more popular, more enduring, and more radical than Child’s. Freed of the complexities that come with real women’s lives, Lessons in Chemistry allows its fiction to judge our historical past.

How, then, would Lessons in Chemistry have us judge Caroline Maddocks Beard? Was she a success or a failure? Could we not write a better story?

What about the women who were brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking yet still found themselves constrained by the expectations of their time?

One of the central successes of Elizabeth Zott’s show is that it encourages women to ask for more—which, we’re told, they otherwise wouldn’t. And by simply asking, some women are evidently able to achieve whatever dream had been previously out of reach. At her final taping before returning to scientific research, Zott shares the story of a housewife who finally returns to medical school at her encouragement. The refrain for her TV show’s unlikely success (unlikely because Zott is boring and uses too many big words) is that she alone takes women—their intellect, their ambitions, their frustrations—seriously.

Zott’s relationship to her audience is less novel than it may appear, however. Women have long used women’s media as a space to engage with their passions, interests, and potential. Women of her time engaged with Maddocks Beard in rich and varied ways that resist confinement by our own expectations, even though Maddocks Beard herself never fashioned herself as a liberator. In letters from her readers, some wrote like Maddocks Beard was a cousin, sister, or mother, thanking her for her cooking help or sharing stories of successful dinner parties. Some were young women seeking career or educational advice, asking for mentorship in journalism or cooking. Others sent corrections or suggested improvements to her recipes—confidently insisting they knew more.

Almost none of Maddocks Beard’s replies survive—if she replied at all. But each letter is a window into another woman’s world, one more complex than period gender norms might suggest. Women never needed a fictional liberator to enjoy rich interior lives or to find ways to act upon their passions.

Not every woman from the past is equally important; not all their stories are equally instructive. Nor do historical women deserve praise simply for existing within oppressive structures. But invented figures like Elizabeth Zott risk flattening our understanding of the past. They overwrite the real experiences of women with fantasies of meritocratic success. The cost is not just historical inaccuracy—it’s a diminished capacity to reckon with the actual constraints, compromises, and partial victories that shape women’s lives. Elizabeth Zott is relentlessly ahead of her time—except, that’s not possible. No matter how progressive or forward-thinking we perceive ourselves to be, we are all frustratingly of our time in ways difficult to see from our current vantage point.

It’s something of an overused truism that historians are storytellers, but I think this misses something essential about the work of turning archival manuscripts into books or articles. The past does not always make for a good story. It’s messy, uneven, unresolved. Prioritizing a clean narrative over substance makes it easy to lose sight of the people we claim to be studying. The demand for a good story quickly turns historical subjects into moral ones: which histories are the “right” ones to tell?

The historian’s job is not to craft careful moral sermons from the past. In response to the current Trump administration’s cuts to grants conflicting with its understanding of “patriotic” histories (not to mention other right-wing historical revisionism), there’s a powerful urge to find heroes who embody contemporary ideals of resistance. And as funding for humanities research precipitously declines, a trend that began even before the second Trump presidency, some of the largest grantmaking organizations have stopped funding pre- and early-modern research that does not promise clear, direct relevance to the present day.

This impulse, while perhaps less existentially threatening or openly hostile than other attacks on humanities research, still discourages us from seeing historical figures in all their complexity. Caroline Maddocks Beard wasn’t a protofeminist icon, and we do a disservice to her and to ourselves to try and resurrect her as such. In her papers, she could be arrogant, condescending, and resistant to change. I don’t know if she would have considered herself a feminist or called her life a success. I don’t even know if she’d want to be called Caroline Maddocks Beard rather than Caroline Maddocks, her maiden name. She retained her ex-husband’s name long after their divorce, but was that resignation, pragmatism, or something else entirely? Women from history don’t often leave us with the answers to every question we might like to ask or with a clean, satisfying narrative arc.

The past does not always make for a good story. It’s messy, uneven, unresolved. […] The demand for a good story quickly turns historical subjects into moral ones: which histories are the “right” ones to tell?

I don’t inherently object to escapist media like Lessons in Chemistry. But fictional stories often dominate our collective historical imagination. Most professional historians writing about women’s history do so for academic audiences; their work rarely reaches the public. And in popular historical representations, women remain deeply underrepresented. Of the 350 most popular historical biopics released since 2000, only 18 percent feature female protagonists. In the absence of a broader archive of women’s stories, fiction takes center stage.

Invented third-wave, girlboss prodigies like Elizabeth Zott obscure the real complexities of women’s lives and elide our ability to honestly confront systemic barriers to success. Their stories are so much easier, so much more gratifying, than the flawed, unfinished, and often insufficiently feminist realities of the past. Caroline Maddocks Beard doesn’t need a miniseries or a spot in our pantheon of household names. But perhaps, through her, we can remember that the real lives of women—full of compromise, ambition, disappointment, and resilience—are more illuminating than any invented genius who always gets the last word.