Participant Info

First Name
Rebecca
Last Name
Sharpless
Country
United States
State
TX Texas
Affiliation
Texas Christian University
Website URL
Keywords
food, US South, women, labor, work
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a scholar of the American South and Texas, emphasizing women’s work, particularly in food. I am currently writing a history of baking in the South from precontact till the present, with the working title of “Grain and Fire.”

Recent Publications
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
“In ‘Favor of our Fathers’ Country and Government’: Unionist Women in North Texas.” In Texas Women and the Civil War: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi, edited by Deborah Linsley Liles and Angela Boswell. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016.
“Sallie McNeill: A Woman’s Higher Education in Antebellum
Texas.” In Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless, 82-104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
“The Women of St. Paul’s Were Worried: Transforming Domestic Skills into Saleable Commodities in Texas.” In The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South. Edited by John T. Edge, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby, 32-56. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2013.
“‘She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes’: Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies.” Southern Cultures 18, no. 2 (summer 2012), 45-58.
“Neither Friends nor Peers: Idella Parker, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and the Limits of Gender Solidarity at Cross Creek.”
Journal of Southern History 78, no. 2 (May 2012), 327-60.
“The Servants and Mrs. Rawlings: Martha Mickens and African American Life at Cross Creek.” Journal of Florida History
89, no. 4 (spring 2011), 494-523.
Media Coverage
"The 'Soul Sisters ' in the Kitchen." Op-ed, New York Times , July 30, 2013.
Country Focus
United States South
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, 20th century
Expertise by Topic
Economic History, Emancipation, Family, Food History, Gender, Local & Regional, Race, Rural & Agrarian History, Slavery, Women