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for Man’s fall from grace and his subsequent expulsion from such an idyllic setting.
The woman and the apple drama is also a familiar trope in legends, fairy tales, and ensuing texts. For example, it arises in “Snow White,” in which the evil queen uses a poisoned apple to kill the virginal protagonist. Snow White’s life is only spared thanks to the intervention of a man, Prince Charming.4 Along with the physical aspect of these divisions of labor and responsibility, the expulsion and subsequent curse brought about by Eve’s intellectual curiosity also serves to create the division of labor at a spiritual level. Consequently, men become hunters and gatherers in a hostile world, a fate supposedly brought about by the actions of a woman.
Conversely, women are obligated to reproduce and to endure the pain of domestic labor in childbirth (occasioned by the curse) that further confine them to a domestic space, notwithstanding the critical significance of their labor to humanity’s preservation.
Throughout the centuries, patriarchal societies of dissimilar theology have restricted women to a domestic sphere. As a result, the kitchen became a space where women could assert their relevant existence using culinary practices, and through these, they developed close affiliations with other women. Male-imposed gendered division of functions totally disregarded women’s intellectual aspirations, echoing an indictment of Eve’s first transgression: intellectual appetite. In fact, male control (now in direct alignment with the Creator’s) determines that a woman’s quest for knowledge is the reason for her dismissal, for Eve damages humanity by daring to yearn for information, which has led her to a critical act of consumption.
Utopian Eve’s yearning for learning, and the constricted domestic space that her female descendants later occupy powerfully reverberates in seventeenth-century Mexico, when Sor