Negotiating Womanhood in the Households and on the Picket Lines of the American South, 1865–1965

African American and white women of the South have shared a complex relationship in history and historiography. In antebellum households, mistresses and slaves worked together in the daily production of white familial and domestic relations, a tension-fraught play of patriarchy that found them standing on either side of the race and class divide. In the postwar period, white women gathered up the remaining vestiges of privilege to mark out a domestic ideal that distinguished them from their African American and poor white neighbors—and paid freedwomen to assist them in the task. African American and white women may have been brought together to undertake the gendered business of housekeeping, but slavery, segregation, and class created a gulf too difficult to bridge. Historians have encountered this gulf in their research, but have traversed “the color line” to build a nuanced portrait of this inextricable yet problematic relationship. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese led the charge twenty-five years ago with her magnificent study entitled Within the Plantation Household, followed by Marli Weiner’s Mistresses and Slaves, Brenda Stevenson’s work on the community of Loudon County, Virginia, and Laura F. Edwards’s research into gendered strife and confusion in postwar North Carolina.¹

The four books reviewed here also explore the historical relationship between African American and white women—in the household, the workforce, and on the picket line, and from the immediate postwar period through to the civil rights movement. Rebecca Sharpless’s Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens offers a history of African American cooks from 1865–1960. Sharpless deconstructs the popular Aunt Jemima stereotypes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the evolution of a work culture amongst African American women. Crystal N. Feimster’s book, Southern Horrors, anchors the biographies of Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ida B. Wells within a wider examination of anti-rape and anti-lynching campaigns. While Feimster’s work lofts over the color line, Kimberly K. Little’s book, You Must Be from the North, focuses primarily on the development of white women’s activist culture in civil rights Memphis. Like Feimster, Little argues that women’s social reform activities fostered the development of coalitions for political change. Jonathan Daniel Wells and Shelia R. Phipps’s edited collection of essays, Entering the Fray, also demonstrate the ways in which women of the New South “stepped gingerly into the pulsing public arena,” balancing activism with “current gender limitations” (5). These books explore varied times and events, and adopt different methodological approaches, but they come together to understand the relationship between African American and white women, their journey toward civil and political rights, and the development of a new brand of womanhood in the American South.

A House Divided

For fifteen generations, African American and white women worked together in the kitchens of the South. Much of the recent historiography in this area has used an interdisciplinary lens to examine representations of the cook, culminating in the Aunt Jemima trademark.² In Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens, Rebecca Sharpless serves up something quite different: shifting her gaze back to the kitchen, she uses job advertisements, cookbooks, correspondence to New Deal agencies, interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, and late twentieth-century autobiographies to allow African American women to tell their own stories about the balancing act...