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Rural women comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960. On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women's labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities: keeping house, sewing clothing, cultivating and cooking food, and bearing and raising children. But despite their contributions to the southern agricultural economy, rural women's stories have remained largely untold.

Using oral history interviews and written memoirs, Rebecca Sharpless weaves a moving account of women's lives on Texas cotton farms. She examines how women from varying ethnic backgrounds -- German, Czech, African American, Mexican, and Anglo-American -- coped with difficult circumstances. The food they cooked, the houses they kept, the ways in which they balanced field work with housework, all yield insights into the twentieth-century South. And though rural women's lives were filled with routines, many of which were undone almost as soon as they were done, each of their actions was laden with importance, says Sharpless, for the welfare of a woman's entire family depended heavily upon her efforts.

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CHOICE Review

Sharpless, director of Baylor university's Institute for Oral History, presents a glimpse into the lives of Texas women who, with men and children, harvested little more than a subsistence living as black-dirt cotton farmers (1900-40). Plowing new ground, the author adds to the scholarship of notable historian Gilbert C. Fite (Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980, CH, May'85). Yet, in so doing, Sharpless offers a work comparable to that of Thad Sitton and Dan K. Utley's From Can See to Can't: Texas Cotton Farmers on the Southern Prairies (CH, Apr'98). Sharpless uses conventional written sources but augments these with oral history interviews of the women who worked the land decades before. She maintains that "rural women's daily, mundane lives" were exactly that, but in addition, women contributed to the economic viability of the family. Millie Stimpson "left her husband at least twice in the first ten years of marriage . . . when the cotton needed chopping, Eddie Stimpson 'finely beg mom back'"; Eddie needed Millie. Fertile Ground will appeal to agricultural, economic, family, and women's historians as well as to students of Americana. Photographs; maps; illustrations; tables; notes. All levels. P. D. Travis Texas Woman's University

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Rebecca Sharpless is director of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History in Waco, Texas.