If You Give a Woman a Cookie

Pablo Espinosa Gutiérrez Debbi Fields, the founder of Mrs. Fields, has been called both a “feminist American dream” and a “good-looking front” for a multimillion-dollar brand. The reality, though, is somewhere in between Hot, fresh, still-warm cookies — that’s what drew in shoppers when Mrs. Fields Cookies began to pop up in American malls in the early 1980s. Store-bought Chips Ahoy! were known for being crumbly and crunchy, and the similarly mall-associated David’s Cookies championed crispness. But the chocolate chip rounds from Mrs. Fields Cookies, founded by Debbi Fields in...