Bowl By Bowl: Black Women, Food Selling, and Survival in the Antebellum North

Abstract This article explores the lives of Black women, free and enslaved, who hawked prepared foods like pepper pot stew on the streets and in the markets of northern cities between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Though ubiquitous in their own time, evidence relating to female provisioners is scattered and thin. These women appear, fleetingly, in newspaper accounts, reminiscences, census records, legal documents, and visual culture. Stitching together these archival fragments reveals the importance of Black women to urban commerce. Food selling allowed them to evade the coercion associated with most kinds of work available to them but forced them into fraught negotiations in public space. Most Black women vendors earned meager incomes, but for a few of them, this selling offered relatively good compensation. By keeping a sharp focus on these petty entrepreneurs, this study offers a critical new perspective on northern urban life, labor, and racial hierarchies during the nineteenth century.