Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (review)

In Cooking In Other Women’s Kitchens, Rebecca Sharpless explores the realm of domestic labour in the South, particularly from the perspective of domestic cooks, from the end of the Civil War to the middle of the 20th century. Noting that as African-American female labourers transitioned to wage labour after the Civil War, African-American women in the South moved from the fields, to domestic work, to manufacturing, and finally to pink-collar office work in the 20th century. Her study, rather than focusing on these larger workplace transitions, centres on the early shift to domestic labour, which lasted roughly until World War II, when the transition to a war-time economy opened up opportunities for wage-earning women, including African-American women, in the industrial workplace. Sharpless presents illustrations of African-American women working in white women’s kitchens as paid domestic help, refuting the long-held stereotype of African-American cooks as naturally endowed with kitchen prowess. As a group, domestic workers were on the front lines of interracial contact in the Jim Crow South in the 20th century. As such, Sharpless argues that domestic labourers “created a vanguard of resistance to the iniquities of segregation, as they found myriad ways to maintain their dignity and sense of self-worth.” (xiii)

Inventively utilizing cookbooks as primary sources, as well as memoirs and letters written by African-American cooks, Sharpless illustrates how African-American women both wielded some semblance of power within the kitchen, and how their lives were shaped by the racial inequities of the social caste system in the South in the 20th century. Though the Jim Crow South constructed barriers so as to segregate black bodies from white spaces, the irony was that white female employers had come to rely on the centrality of African-American women’s labour within the domestic sphere. Though racial segregation also permeated the kitchen in various ways, such as confining the cook, especially a live-in cook, to certain areas of the home, and mandating that she not touch food once prepared for the employer’s family, African-American domestic workers more frequently complained of long working hours, sometimes without even a full day off per week to tend to their own homes and children. Under these circumstances, African-American cooks carved spaces of autonomy within the confines of the kitchen. Inventive cooks who took pride in their creations were oftentimes asked to reproduce recipes for their employer’s personal collection. Offering incomplete recipes, or no recipe at all, functioned to protect a domestic servant’s status within the household. Many cooks also chose to withhold their labour, walking off the job with little or no notice to their employer, when working conditions within the domestic sphere grew intolerable. Aside from the direct withdrawal of labour, African-American cooks developed other indirect methods of protesting or improving their working conditions. For example, Sharpless notes that the transition from in-house domestic service, which was more prevalent in the 19th century, to one where African-American women commuted to their employer’s house on a daily basis, was a change that African-American domestic labourers forged in order to avoid a 24 hour work day and to gain more autonomy in their personal lives. African-American cooks also employed other techniques, such as tool breaking, once household technologies like gas and electric stoves were introduced into better homes, which served to slow work down or protest working conditions.

One of the more illuminating aspects of Sharpless’ analysis deals explicitly with the formal and informal organization tactics of domestic labourers. Letters to the President and Mrs. Roosevelt during the New Deal illustrated how African-American cooks attempted to influence public policy in order to decrease their workday and workload, and to improve their general working conditions. Though these letters made little impact upon New Deal policies, nothing terrified white, female, Southern employers more...