Cooking for the Quarters by Emily West
Women who prepared food for enslaved people, rather than enslavers, have been neglected in historical scholarship. Their labor within the quarters has been marginalized, belittled, and even ignored, because it fell within the remit of gendered care and nurture. In this book, Emily West illustrates how these mostly older women performed vital roles in slaveholding sites, as their enslavers increasingly tried to regulate food distribution, preparation, and consumption. Enslavers attempted to impose highly efficient, communal food regimes to minimize waste and time lost from work elsewhere. They routinely tasked older women with the feeding and care of infants, but also deployed them to prepare food for children and enslaved adults to eat collectively. Conversely, in the relative privacy of the quarters, where enslaved people preferred to eat, cooking became both a form of gendered exploitation, and an expression of love, empowerment, and pleasure.-
Cultivating Success in the South
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Gruesome Looking Objects
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Old Age and American Slavery
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Camp Ford's Civil War
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The Sweetness of Life
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At the Altar of Lynching
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Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South
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Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion
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War Stuff
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A New Plantation World
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Performing Disunion
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Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier
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Freedom Seekers
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Beyond the Rope
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Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880
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Reviewing the South
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Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood
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Thomas Jefferson's Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress
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The Merchants' Capital
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Freedom in a Slave Society
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Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry
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Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South
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Rethinking American Emancipation
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Claiming the Union
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Death and the American South
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Masters, Slaves, and Exchange
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Black Resettlement and the American Civil War
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Carolinian Crucible
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Gendering Secession
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Dollars for Dixie
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Thomas Jefferson
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Freedom's Crescent
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African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry
Emily West is Professor of Early American History at Brasenose College, University of Oxford.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781009544375 |
| ISBN 10 | 1009544373 |
| Title | Cooking for the Quarters |
| Author | Emily West |
| Series | Cambridge Studies On The American South |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 2026-10-31 |
| Number of pages | 323 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |