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.