Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens is about black women who worked as cooks for white families in the South prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most of the story is centered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this setting, race, gender, history, and the technology of household production complicate the usual tensions between employees and employers. On its own terms, the book is successful, particularly in meeting its goal to “discover how African American cooks successfully functioned within a world of extremely hard work, low wages, and omnipresent racial strife” (p. xiii) and to do so by drawing heavily on the women's “own words and ideas” (p. xvii). Rebecca Sharpless provides compelling insights into black women's struggle to support their families and to navigate the extraordinary demands on their time, energy, and dignity.

The chapters are arranged by theme, rather than chronologically. In turn, they address how women became cooks, the food they prepared, their compensation in cash and in kind, their family life, the tensions inherent in their relationships with employers, and finally the decline of domestic service as the dominant nonagricultural occupation for black women. Sharpless draws from an impressive range of historical sources. Preeminent position is given to the letters and narratives of black employees, and contrasting material is drawn from white employers. Having viewpoints from both sides of the market enriches the history. These highly personal accounts are supplemented with information from cookbooks, newspapers, extensive work by other historians and sociologists, and, on occasion, data from census manuscripts. The result is a valuable account of the lives of women who have left comparatively few firsthand memoirs and whose work left them, for the most part, outside the scope of formal labor market regulation and investigation. It is not a deeply analytical work; rather, it cleaves closely to the task of documenting features of the cook's job and implications for how black women worked and lived.

The chapter on “Long Hours and Little Pay” (chapter 3) might be the most interesting one for economic historians because it gets to the heart of the exchange between cooks and their employers. In some ways, it might also be the most frustrating for economic historians. This is where a basic framework of supply, demand, and compensating differentials might have helped organize the fragmentary evidence at hand. Adding evidence regarding the frequency of quits, which is presented much later in the book (chapter 6), would have clarified the nature of the market mechanism—one in which employees were willing and able to seek better jobs, either within the constraints of the Jim Crow South or within a different set of constraints in the North. An excellent example of what I have in mind is George J. Stigler's NBER Occasional Paper on “Domestic Servants in the United States, 1900–1940” (New York, 1946), which is still one of the best investigations of the economic history of domestic service in the United States. Stigler's paper lacks the personal detail that adds so much to Sharpless's narrative, but it does have an analytical framework that helps organize and make sense of data regarding the supply, demand, and wages of domestic servants.

Because the book is arranged primarily by theme and is focused on revealing the inner-workings of the lives of black cooks, readers get a less-than-sharp view of important changes in the external environment—the enormous economic, educational, political, and technological changes that influenced the occupational and geographic distribution of black workers and job-specific characteristics between 1865 and 1960. The book does address some of these changes, especially in the concluding chapter (chapter 7), but I found the book to be most effective and original when turned inward on the lives of black women, inside and outside work.

Readers of this Journal will perceive missed opportunities—most notably the selective use of census data which practically beg for a more comprehensive treatment—but will also appreciate the effort to draw on a wide range of sources to reveal details of a peculiar and intimate employment relationship. Scholars interested in the history of domestic service in the United States, particularly its racial dimension, will find the book valuable.