num_pages: 304
description: As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers' homes 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 and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women's employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As 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 this book evokes Afr
language: English
title: Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960
publisher: The University of North Carolina Press