Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens, Enhanced Ebook: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960

by Rebecca Sharpless

Overview

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. In Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.The enhanced electronic version of the book includes twenty letters, photographs, first-person narratives, and other documents, each embedded in the text where it will be most meaningful. Featuring nearly 100 pages of new material, the enhanced e-book offers readers an intimate view into the lives of domestic workers, while also illuminating the journey a historian takes in uncovering these stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469611020
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	70 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Rebecca Sharpless is associate professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms.

Editorial Reviews

"Sharpless labors to fill a pantry with stories from the legion of southerners who experienced a remarkable slice of American history."
-Ohio Valley History

"Sharpless offers an in-depth and complete portrait of African American cooks and the nature of their work and lives in this period. The cooks' voices are very compelling, and Sharpless does a good job of letting them largely speak for themselves."
-Oral History Forum

"Sharpless' book is wonderfully detailed, and provides voice for the often overlooked African-American domestic. . . . Highly recommended."
-Labour/Le Travail

"Using plantation account books, memoirs from servants, Federal Writers' Project narratives, cookbooks, and census records, Sharpless excavates the experiences of the black domestic working class in the South."
-Journal of African American History

"Sharpless's engaging use of primary evidence allows African American cooks themselves to define, describe, and interpret their work, their skills, and the contours of their lives. This book is a pleasure to read and an important, impressive piece of scholarship."—Lu Ann Jones, author of Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South

"Anyone who wants to know the real story behind Kathryn Stockett's book The Help will savor Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens, Rebecca Sharpless's compelling history of southern domestic work. It's a riveting read and it's nonfiction."—Jessica B. Harris, Queens College, author of Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking

From the Publisher