Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960 (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

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. 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.

• Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South
• The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South (Southern Literary Studies)
• The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South
• Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
• 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
• Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (California Studies in Food and Culture)
• Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
• Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food
• Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
• Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm