Cooking for the Quarters

Enslaved Women and the Labor of Care in the Antebellum South
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.

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