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    "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies: An article from Southern Cultures 18:2, Summer 2012: The Special Issue on Food
    "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies: An article from Southern Cultures 18:2, Summer 2012: The Special Issue on Food
    "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies: An article from Southern Cultures 18:2, Summer 2012: The Special Issue on Food
    Ebook40 pages22 minutes

    "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies: An article from Southern Cultures 18:2, Summer 2012: The Special Issue on Food

    By Rebecca Sharpless

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    About this ebook

    In April 1930, five hundred potential customers showed up at the opening of Staunton's curb market, and in 1936, the market's most successful vendor, Nettie Shull, made more than $2,000 by selling potato chips, fried apple pies, potato salad, and dressed poultry."

    This article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.

    Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUNC Center for the Study of the American South
    Release dateMay 1, 2012
    ISBN9781469600321
    "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies: An article from Southern Cultures 18:2, Summer 2012: The Special Issue on Food
    Author

    Rebecca Sharpless

    Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. Her most recent book is Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960.

    Read more from Rebecca Sharpless

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      Book preview

      "She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes" - Rebecca Sharpless

      ESSAY

      She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes

      Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies

      by Rebecca Sharpless

      White women, mostly the wives of farm owners, and fewer African American women sought to enhance their family income through petty sales of everything from chickens to caramel cakes. The sales ranged from peddling foraged items such as blackberries to organized curb markets with firm rules of engagement and pricing. Curb market in Durham, North Carolina, 1948, courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library.

      Buying local food is all the rage today. Serious students of food tout the advantages of produce from nearby regions both for flavor and environmental advantages. Long before the word locavore entered the national vocabulary, however, southern women developed their own regional food networks, both as producers and consumers. During the first third of the twentieth century, enterprising farm women produced and sold eggs, chickens, butter, fruit, and vegetables, and discerning urban housewives bought these products, sometimes from local stores and sometimes directly from the growers. That both groups tried to gain advantage in the exchange demonstrates the complexities created by people with disparate goals and by urbanization, which led to an increasing divide between town and farm people. Women showed their acumen in supplying food for the market and for their families, locally grown and purchased.¹

      The market relationships between rural and urban women were on the minds of many southerners in the 1920s and 1930s. Two fictional examples show the dual sides of the interplay. In William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, Cora Tull, a quintessential good wife, takes the advice of a Miss Lawington, probably a home demonstration agent, and scrapes and saves to buy some purebred chickens which produce superior eggs. Cora then contracts with a woman from town to buy her homemade cakes.

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