Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Book Review

Rebecca Sharpless' book Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices, chronicles the lives of Texas woman on cotton farms between 1900-1940. She maintains that women's labor was vital to the workings of a successful farm, and using oral histories and written memoirs, attempts to paint portraits of real life woman in the south overcoming hardships as they bare children, keep house, cook food, and plant. However, a major setback of the book is a lack of research. In essence, the book is too scholarly for laypeople, and too short on research for academics.

For example, right up front Sharpless admits that memoirs cited in her book "total less than a dozen," and that she "found no collections of personal letters or diaries to reconstruct woman's internal lives." She also relied heavily on oral interviews conducted from 1990 to 1995, but states that she found her interviews "strictly by word of mouth, by asking persons likely to know older woman in rural areas." Seeing as how she states that her goal in the book is to "analyze the physical conditions of women's lives in the cotton south and to discover how they coped with a reality that was bleak," she sure left out a pretty big opportunity to look into the internal lives of woman at that time, since the vast majority of her sources were self-published memoirs that dealt mainly with daily activities that woman did, and instructions on things like how to sew, churn butter, and so forth.

To Sharpless' credit, though, she did do a through job when it came to the first half of her thesis. The book does do a good job of analyzing the physical hardships that woman faced on cotton farms. Chapters one through four give detailed accounts of women working in the crop-lien system, gender and family relations, housekeeping, cooking, and labor in the fields. However, at times, the narratives she attempts to construct in her prose read like dull daily itineraries. In my opinion, chapters five and six do a much better job of using narrative to explain points on women in the community and urbanization of the Blackland Prairie much better.

Another flaw of the book, however, is the lack of study on ethnic women in the Blackland Prairie. This again seems to be due to a lack of research on Sharpless' part - only one of the amateur memoirs cited in her research was written by an African American. Mexican American woman are overlooked as well.
Also, a view of what the average woman in the north was going through during these periods would have been helpful. After all, it's difficult to judge just how dissimilar someone's life is when you don't have a model of comparison to judge against.
Now, this lack of thorough research wouldn't have been a problem had the book been intended for a lay audience simply out to read an interesting history book. However, the tone of the book is clearly scholarly, so what you end up with is a book that lacks an audience. It seems to me that Sharpless couldn't decide if she wanted to write a scholarly book or not, and as a result the work suffers. Had she given a little more thought into just exactly whom she was writing this book for, I think there would have been a better balance.

I do give recognition to Sharpless on completing half of her thesis, though. If you're interested in learning about the outer workings of women in the south during the first half of the 1900s, you'll find some very useful information. However, if you're looking to learn about the inner trials and tribulations such woman faced, you'll be disappointed. Overall, I give the book a B+ for completing the first half of her thesis, but a C- on the second half. Frankly, I expected more.