Pumpkin pie first appeared as a recipe in the 1796 cookbook American Cookery, published by New England writer Amelia Simmons, and was sold mainly in that region. When the dessert gained popularity, it was billed as a New England specialty. That connection to the North translated to the pumpkin being appropriated by abolitionists leading up to and during the Civil War, Ott says. Women who championed the anti-slavery cause also wrote poetry and short stories about pumpkins, praising them as a symbol of the resilient, northern family farmer.

"My dad asked how my BF's tech startup was going. And he did"n’t know how to respond because… well, he didn’t have one. That was the last guy I dated. Brutal mixup.

“Women are often judged on their ability to meet certain standards for housekeeping — keeping your house clean, parenting, making sure the kids are clean, that sort of thing,” she said. “So in that sense, Thanksgiving is the epitome of all those expectations because we expect the house to be clean, and the host to be entertaining, and the food to be good. If the family falls flat in any of those ways, the woman is often the one being judged for that failure to meet expectations.”

Thanksgiving may have remained a regional, ad-hoc holiday if not for the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, a Northern writer who is often considered the “Godmother” of American Thanksgiving. In 1825, she initiated annual letter-writing campaigns to governors asking that they collectively declare the final Thursday of November a celebration of thanksgiving. As the editor of Godey’s Lady Book, the most widely read magazine of the 19th century, she devoted pages of editorial space to pitching the national holiday as a unifying force in a young and diverse nation. Her 1827 novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England, gives the first detailed account of the Puritan Thanksgiving feast. She dedicates an entire chapter to the meal, in which she describes the “celebrated pumpkin pie” as “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”