Participant Info

First Name
Rebecca
Last Name
Sharpless
Affiliation
Texas Christian University
Website URL
Keywords
food, US South, women, labor, work
Additional Contact Information

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
5, 8
Expertise by Topic
Economic History, Emancipation, Family, Food History, Gender, Local & Regional, Race, Rural & Agrarian History, Slavery, Women