Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Women, Gender, Labor, Food Studies, Oral History, Domestic Work, Cooking, Consumption, Culinary History, Yerba Mate

About Me: Rebekah E. Pite is an Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College (USA). She is a social and cultural historian of Latin America, and especially Argentina, with an analytical focus on gender, labor, and food. In 2013, she published her first book, Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food (UNC Press), which won book prizes from Gourmand and the Chile-Río de la Plata subsection of LASA. In April 2016, she published her second book, La mesa está servida. Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo y la domesticidad de la Argentina del siglo XX (Edhasa). Dr. Pite is currently researching the socio-cultural history of the local infusion yerba mate in the nineteenth and twentieth century Río de la Plata region.

Recent Publications: Books:

La mesa está servida. Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo y la domesticidad en la Argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2016).

Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Recent Articles:

Inés Dunstan and Rebekah E. Pite, “Mistress vs. Maid: Race, Class, Nation, and Boundaries Between Women in Argentine Fiction Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History 30, no. 2 (2018): 401-422.

“La cocina criolla: A History of Food and Race in Twentieth-Century Argentina,” in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, eds. Paulina Alberto and Eduardo Elena (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 99-125.

“Engendering Argentine History: A Historiographical Review of Recent Gender-Based Histories of Women during the National Period,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 25, no. 2 (2014): 41-62.

“¿Así en la tele como en la casa? Patronas y empleadas en la década del sesenta en Argentina” Revista de Estudios Sociales 45 (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia: January-April 2013): 212-224.

“Entertaining Inequalities: Doña Petrona, Juanita Bordoy, and Domestic Work in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no 1 (February 2011): 97-128.

Media Coverage: Radio, television, magazines, and newspapers in Argentina and Uruguay. In the United States, I have consulted with OZY, NPR, and BBC News.