| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rebecca Sharpless. Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900–1940. (Studies in Rural Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xxiii, 319. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.

Gender issues have been prominent in the study of rural history during the last twenty years. Regional studies by Deborah Fink, Sally Ann McMurry, Mary Neth, Nancy Gray Osterud, Glenda Riley, and others have focused on women in different geographical places in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. In a welcome addition to this literature, Rebecca Sharpless's book examines the period 1900 to 1940 in the Blackland Prairie, a strip of Texas extending approximately from San Antonio northeast to the Oklahoma border, which around 1900 grew as much as six percent of the nation's cotton. 1

Sharpless emphasizes how poverty, racism, and the South's restrictive definitions of gender shaped women's lives. For instance, she shows that whether a woman was part of a land-owning, tenant, sharecropping, or farm labor family affected how much cotton chopping, cultivating, and picking she did, in contrast to housework and childcare. So did race; in all land tenure categories, black women did more fieldwork than their white counterparts. Within Mexican-American families, however, which became increasingly numerous over time in the southern Blacklands, women did relatively little fieldwork, despite economic need. . . .

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