Hey, Waitress!: the USA from the other side of the tray Alison Owings University of California Press, 334pp, £10.95 ISBN 0520242246

Alison Owings is on the side of the angels - of that there can be no doubt. And I don't mean "angels" as in "be an angel and get me a cup of coffee". Her interest in the waitressing life began when she herself was serving coffee and classic American sundries on her way through college. She remembers a conversation with an older colleague:

"When you can have ice cream and fried onion rings for free," I blurted, "you have soup?" . . . I realised only then that she was eating HoJo soup because she had eaten enough HoJo junk, and that she had eaten enough HoJo junk because she was waiting tables not only for summer . . . Choosing soup means some girls do not go to college.

Now, many years later, driven by a pressing sense of social and gender iniquity, Owings has tracked down any waitress with a story to tell. The results, to be frank, are mixed. There are brilliant vignettes and some subtle, unobtrusive character studies. A plucky 1950s unionist called Beulah Compton makes you want to stand up and cheer for humankind. The civil rights segregation battles of the Deep South are retold through the eyes of waitresses serving when black people campaigned for the right to eat in the same restaurants as whites. I loved the testimonies of the "Harvey Girls", respectable young women reputed to have civilised the Wild West with their Judy Garland morals and impenetrable under-frillies. An impossible snob of Hungarian descent tells a wonderfully warming story about the time she and a busboy crashed into each other, yet each was so professional that between them they managed to keep the tray straight and the drinks unspilt even as they fell over.

Two things mar the enterprise: first a tendency to over-interpret, spurred, it seems, by a nagging sense that the topic is not weighty enough to justify itself. Thus, Owings closes her introduction with a set of rhetorical questions: "What is so dismissable about a woman setting food on a table? Is it because millions do the same for free? Is it the tip? The old connection with loose morals, alcohol and men?" While it is true that waitressing is not a career for which you would wish over the cradle of your first-born, there is one blindingly obvious fact: we dismiss waitressing because it's ill-paid and menial and enjoys - in so far as such things are measurable - no greater or lesser status than any other ill-paid, menial job. Owings's attempt to stud reliable class bigotry with jewels of unfalsifiable nuance works against the rigour of her research.

Second, and more importantly, the bar she uses to determine what to include and what to leave out is nowhere near high enough. Nobody would deny the importance, texture and complication of a waitress's life, any more than you would with anyone else, but the truth is, the raw business of asking people what they want and then getting it for them is pretty much the same from one place to another. There are many descriptions of receiving plates, putting them down and taking them away again, all delivered verbatim; to object to these for reasons of tedium is doubtless to be accused of dismissing the job, but the truth is, it's a bit tedious.

And yet Owings's project is absolutely laudable. She respectfully and interestingly charts the part this profession has played in the long game of female financial independence. Over the past century and a half, the eatery has been the backdrop to many major historical events - and Owings recognises as much. Her tendency to overstate her case is something that I myself may have overstated.

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian

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