The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism: White Working-class Women and Femininity in Johannesburg Department Stores, 1930s–1970s

• Published in: International labor and working class history Vol. 104; pp. 55 - 76
• Main Author: Kenny, Bridget
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Apartheid; Archival research; Black people; Consumers; Department stores; Employment; Families & family life; Femininity; Girls; Heterosexuality; Housework; Middle class; Mothers; Nationalism; Retail industry; Retail stores; Semiotics; Special Feature; White people; Women; Workers; Working class; United Kingdom > UK; South Africa; Consumption; South Africa; Class; White women; Shop girl; Service work
• ISSN: 0147-5479; 1471-6445
• DOI: 10.1017/S014754792300025X

Based on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.