Late 19th-Century Dining Options for Lady Naturalists

The dining options for late-19th-century lady naturalists? There weren't many.  Early women in science dining alone was shocking to Victorian mores and also, apparently, currently, to my twelve-year-old son, who asked me who I sit with at lunch and when I said no one, I sit alone, I am a freelance writer, honey, he said, That is so lonely and sad. Mom, do you have any friends? 

Yes, I do, I told him. Cake and coffee. 

In his book American Home Cooking: A Popular History Tim Miller writes that the growing trend of restaurants in urban areas at the turn-of-the-century were chop houses and steakhouses and they were the purview of men.  Ladies had ladies lunchrooms and cake and coffee shops, or cake and coffee saloons as they were charmingly called. Today we might say cafe.

They were places that served a limited menu and, be still my heart, mostly cakes.

Image credits:

Getty Image, Six Victorian Women Eat Lunch At A School Lab Somewhere In Pennsylvania, 1900
Jeremy Keith, Flickr, Cake and Coffee, 2010