Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens

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.