In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 by Rebecca Sharpless
  • Jewell C. Debnam
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960. By Rebecca Sharpless (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xxix plus 273 pp. $35.00).

In Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960, Rebecca Sharpless argues that domestic work served as the intermediate step between slavery and full participation in the American economy for African American women. In the wake of the Civil War, domestic work was virtually the only option for African American women. But unlike cleaning, childcare, and [End Page 549] laundry work, cooking required a refined skillset that separated cooks from other domestic workers. Through their work in white homes, African American women shaped southern cuisine while also using their jobs as stepping stones to better lives for themselves and their families. Organized around African American women’s paths into and out of kitchen work, Sharpless expertly details the changes in African American women’s economic and employment opportunities from emancipation until the middle of the Civil Rights Movement.

Sharpless begins her study by discussing the importance of domestic work to the financial stability of African American families. Unlike most of the women they worked for, African American women needed to work in order to provide for their families. Motivated by family needs, African American women entered whites’ homes as cooks, in some cases for a second time as many early domestic workers had been slaves. Many whites assumed that black women had innate cooking skills. Popular images of black mammy figures, most notably Aunt Jemima, affirmed southerners’ beliefs about black women’s innate cooking ability. Though cooking took great skill, some unskilled black migrants found work as cooks based on whites’ assumption of African American women’s natural cooking ability.

Beyond the laborious nature of the work, many African American women faced hostile work environments. Though the conditions of domestic work were usually better than those of tenant farming, African American domestics were uniquely vulnerable to harassment. Unwanted sexual advances, racist employers, and low wages all made working in white peoples’ homes difficult. According to Sharpless, black women “were considered fair game by white men” making sexual assault the most menacing of all the hardships they faced (138). While African American women were vulnerable to unwanted contact with male employers, Sharpless devotes the most time to relationships between African American women and their employers. Arguing that relationships “became even more tangled when old expectations clashed with current realities,” the author focuses on the gendered space of the home and the impact of Jim Crow segregation in white homes (129). According to Sharpless, White women used a variety of methods to belittle black women employees and create hierarchy in their homes including calling African American women by their first names and forcing them to wear uniforms. African American cooks resisted this treatment by dissembling, quitting, and sometimes stealing food. Poor compensation and racist employers made work difficult. According to Sharpless, “white housewives paid the lowest wages that they could,” often supplementing or even replacing low monetary payments with what they claimed was in-kind compensation of clothing and leftover food (72).

Though many employers treated their employees poorly, demanding excessive labor for low compensation, African American women openly resisted poor treatment in a variety of ways. According to Sharpless, informal resistance methods like spitting in food, absenteeism, and quitting without notice were more common than permanent labor unions and formal labor activism. Sharpless’s discussion of the temporary nature of domestic workers unions between World War I and World War II hinges on the difficulty of organizing workers who were isolated in their employers’ homes. Though unions appeared in many southern cities, Sharpless argues that worker isolation, “the oversupply of willing substitutes,” and “the notorious southern hostility to organized labor” prevented successful union mobilization (84). Sharpless’s use of union organizers’ accounts highlights the barriers to organizing a strong domestic workers union, even for organizers who were [End Page 550] domestic workers themselves. Regardless, Sharpless’s frequent citation of letters to Franklin and Eleanor...

pdf

Share