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ABSTRACT
Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the South African National Research Foundation Human and Social Dynamics funding (grant #96260) and the Incentive Funding for Rated Researchers (grant #109167) for support toward parts of the research for this paper. Thanks also to the community at re:work (IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History), Humboldt University, Berlin, where I was a fellow (2017–2018), for discussions of the project and paper. Thanks to Andrew van der Vlies and Karin Shapiro for encouragement and to two anonymous reviewers for comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City, August Meier papers, 1930–1998, MG340, Box 64, Folder 6, Maryland, Baltimore, Civic Interest Group, 1960.
2 Paulette Dupree. “Inquiry into Serving in Shops,” Sunday Express, October 5, 1969. National Union of Distributive Workers (Witwatersrand Branch) Records. 1939–1984 (AH1601)/Pa. Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand (hereafter AH1601). The National Party (NP) was the Afrikaner nationalist political party that became the ruling party in 1948 in South Africa. Its rule held until democratic elections in 1994. After winning the elections in 1948, it instituted the vast legal and coercive apparatus of apartheid. In the 1960s, a period known as “grand” or “high apartheid,” the NP consolidated its power. Briefly, in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 (see fn 55 below), a crisis ensued challenging the NP from both inside and outside South Africa. Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd worked to defend his position around separate development, and in 1961 and 1966 elections the NP won increasingly decisive victories consolidating its support for apartheid among the white electorate. By the late 1960s, John Vorster had replaced Verwoerd and faced internal NP division over the character of Afrikaner nationalism. Marais Viljoen remained Minister of Labour under Vorster, supporting job reservation, a key policy to protect (at least the idea of) white employment, see O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 100–67.
3 Job reservation, or the “colour bar” was instated in national legislation in Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act. See discussion of the union, below.
4 Volker was one of the MPs who brought the complaint to the Minister of Labour.
5 NUDW Press Statement, 23 May 1969. AH 1601/Pa 6.
6 Paulette Dupree. “Inquiry into Serving in Shops,” Sunday Express, October 5, 1969. AH1601/Pa.
7 Ibid.
8 Benjamin, Arcades Project; Simmel, Philosophy of Money; and Mills, White Collar.
9 For a range of studies of department stores marking national cultures, see for instance, Belisle, Retail Nation; Lancaster, Department Store; Laurenson, Going Up; Leach, Land of Desire; Lerner, Consuming Temple; Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping; Miller, Bon Marche; Randall, Soviet Dream World; Williams, Dream Worlds; and Young, “Marketing the Modern”. And see Kenny, Retail Worker Politics.
10 Zola, Ladies’ Paradise; Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving; Friedberg, Window Shopping; Nava, “Modernity’s Disavowal”; and Wilson, Sphinx in the City, 58–9.
11 Benson, Counter Cultures.
12 Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement; see chapters by Parker and Kenny in Bay and Fabian, Race and Retail; Wolcott, Race, Riots and Roller Coasters. More broadly, see Bay and Fabian, Race and Retail, for a collection of essays charting the multiple dimensions in which race marks retail arenas; and see Bjelopera, City of Clerks, for how white workers reinforced racial privilege in these spaces in turn of the century Philadelphia.
13 Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement; and Wolcott, Race, Riots and Roller Coasters, 3.
14 See Cambridge Dictionary online: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/public, accessed January 8, 2020. See Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 85.
15 See Cambridge Dictionary online: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/private, accessed January 8, 2020. See Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 85–6; and for an extended discussion, see Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 29.
16 See for the introduction of the notion of the liberal public sphere, classically Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; see for feminist and queer theory critiques, Fraser, Justice Interruptus; Young, “Throwing Like a Girl”; Benhabib, “Feminist Theory”; Berlant, Queen of America; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics; and Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. For extended engagement on the concept of public sphere, see Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere.
17 Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 5, argues that “the intimate public sphere of the US [now] … renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere”. Thus, it is through demonstrating trauma, sacrifice, upliftment, etc. in personal relations to a public that “the nation” is re-sanctified; see also “The Subject of True Feeling”; and see also her The Anatomy of Fantasy and Female Complaint. It is not the substance of her analysis of 1990s US “citizenship” (which have a very particular form) which I am applying, but her attentiveness to the specificities of forms of intimacies projected in order to get at politics.
18 And see Berlant, “Intimacy”. For the relevance of intimacy as an articulating concept, see Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents. For the growing importance of attention to affect and intimacy in historical studies, see e.g. Hunt, “The affective, the intellectual and the gender history”; and Thomas, Beneath the Surface.
19 See Wiltse, Contested Waters, ebook 423; Kramer, “White Sales”; and Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 41–3.
20 See Wiltse, Contested Waters; Wolcott, Race, Riots and Roller Coasters; and Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement. For the broader argument and its significance, see Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic.
21 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 12.
22 For instance, see Saunders, “Beyond White Supremacy” and “George Fredrickson’s Black Liberation”; Catsam, “Comparative Imagination”; Greenstein “Identity, State and Capitalist Development” and “The Study of South African Society” in this journal for reviews of some of this literature.
23 See Catsum, “Comparative Imagination,” 4, for the designation, “micro”. Racial capitalism is, of course, so often seen to be a “macro” topic par excellence, and thus, my aim is to theorize it from concrete sites of relational comparison, see Hart, “Relational Comparison Revisited”. And see Hart’s keen gendered critique of how scale (global, local) is attributed differentiated powers of causality, in Disabling Globalization; and, Massey, Space, Place and Gender. My larger project seeks to engage with the ways in which these two places can be brought together in a Hartian “relational comparison” to offer a means of doing an analysis of racial capitalism.
24 Hart, “Relational Comparison Revisited,” 6. She follows Philip McMichael’s categorizations and use of Charles Tilly here. See Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability,” for a useful discussion of the space-time of comparative study, which pushes against comparison of counter-posed bounded units, which, he argues, removes places from time; and see Hart, “Geography and Development” for a concise discussion of articulated renderings of capitalist relations in place.
25 For comparative labor studies between the US and South Africa see Alexander and Halpern, “Comparing Race and Labour”; Cole, Dockworker Power; Cole and van der Walt, “Crossing the Color Lines”; Bonner, Hyslop and van der Walt, “Rethinking Worlds of Labour”; and Rachleff, “Globalization and Union Democracy”. For a definitive comparative study of “white collar” workers (including shop workers) in the US and Germany, which offers a very good example of the first method of comparison, see Kocka, White Collar Workers in America. And see Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond”, on the synergies of transnational and comparative methods.
26 In both cities, Jewish immigrants were central to starting retail businesses. Baltimore’s department stores were started by German Jewish immigrants coming either between the 1820s and the 1850s or in the 1870s. Owners like Joel Gutman, Moses Hutzler, Samuel Hecht, Max Hochschild, Ferdinand Bernheimer and Albert Brager, often began with smaller dry goods stores or as traveling salesmen in surrounding rural areas. Gutman then opened the first department store in Baltimore in 1886, see Krimmel, “Merchant Princes and Their Palaces,” 13. In South Africa, Jewish owners came later and from Eastern Europe and Russia in particular Lithuania, at the turn of the century. Gus Ackerman, father of Raymond Ackerman, began Ackerman’s in 1921, later purchased by Greatermans, founded by Harry Herber. O.K. Bazaars began in 1927 through the partnership of Sam Cohen and Michael Miller. Max Sonnenberg started Woolworths in 1931 in Cape Town, expanding branches to Durban, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg by 1935, see Kaplan, Jewish Roots, 307–331. Many of the more elite department stores were owned by English or Irish immigrants, such as Stuttafords, John Orr’s, Garlicks and Cleghorn & Harris.
27 For more on Johannesburg, see Kenny, Retail Worker Politics. For more detail on Baltimore, see Kenny, “Servicing a Racial Regime.”
28 For a discussion of the usefulness of juxtaposition, see Cooper, “Race, Ideology,” 1135.
29 Morgan State College was one of the oldest and largest historically black colleges (later to become a university) in Maryland. Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins.”
30 Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 230.
31 Ibid., 232–3. For discussion of the historic Greensboro Woolworths sit-in and national student campaign sparked by it, see Morgan and Davies, From Sit-Ins to SNCC; Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights; and for campaigns against the Hecht Company in Washington DC in the 1950s, see Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 153–61.
32 Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 231. For the related history of white working-class Baltimore, see Durr, Behind the Backlash; for an excellent earlier history of Baltimore’s laboring classes, see Rockman, Scraping By.
33 Kramer, “White Sales”; Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood; Fee, Shopes, and Zeidman, The Baltimore Book; and Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 231. For broader context of the Jim Crow South, see Valk and Brown, Living with Jim Crow; and Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad, Remembering Jim Crow. On the treatment of African American customers in department stores, see Kenny, “Servicing a Racial Regime,” 102–3; and Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 41–43.
34 Quoted in Kramer, “White Sales,” 38; for a discussion of efforts to desegregate swimming pools in Baltimore that spanned the mid-1950s, see Wiltse, Contested Waters, ebook 434–442.
35 Kramer, “White Sales,” 38; op. cit. Meier puts it this way: “Curiously department stores had been more discriminatory in Baltimore than probably anywhere else in the country” (“Successful Sit-Ins,” 232).
36 Interview, Jewish Museum of Maryland, OH 459 Edward Tucker, Edward Gutman, and Barbara Gillespie Tucker, March 13, 2001.
37 This included stores in other neighborhoods, and in some cases, black-owned businesses, as well as department stores in northern cities that were more open to African American middle class buyers. For instance, the Murphys were a prominent Baltimorean African American family, with Carl Murphy editing the Afro-American newspaper. Instead of enduring the humiliation of shopping in local department stores, they traveled to Philadelphia and New York for these experiences and goods, see Parker, Department Stores, 51.
38 Kramer, “White Sales,” 43–44. To complaints in the late 1930s and 1940s raised about Jewish department stores in Baltimore not serving black customers, store owners responded that they “‘might lose some white trade if they stopped discriminating against Negroes,’” quoted in Greenberg, “Political Consumer Action,” 70. For Baltimore’s black middle class see Fee, Shopes, and Zeidman, The Baltimore Book.
39 For more detail on the national history, see Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement; for other leisure spaces, see Wolcott, Race, Riots and Roller Coasters; and Wiltse, Contested Waters.
40 Kramer, “White Sales”; Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 234–35.
41 Baltimore-American, Sunday, March 27, 1960, 3M.
42 Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 235; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City, August Meier papers, 1930–1998, MG340, Box 64, Maryland, Baltimore, Civic Interest Group, 1960.
43 Letter dated March 27, 1960 from Helen and Henry Thoms to “Hochild, Kohn & Co”, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
44 Letter, dated April 5, 1960 from Ethel Bova to Dear Sirs, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
45 Letter, n.d., MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
46 Letter, dated March 30, 1960, from Leo Robert Willis to Hochschild Kohn & Company, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
47 Letter dated April 3, 1960, no signature, to Hochschild Kohn and Company, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
48 Letter dated April 18, 1960, from Hilda T. Hofferbert and family, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
49 Postcard dated March 27, 1960, from Charge plate customer, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, Box 6, March-June 1960; nd Subject files-Tea Room Integration (Letters Against).
50 Letter dated, March 27, 1960, To Mr. Louis Kohn from Hattie E. Stowe, MS2721, Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
51 Letter dated, March 27, 1960 to Mr. Sondheim from Adelaide N. Noyes, MS 2721, Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
52 Letter dated, March 27, 1960 from Eleanor Richardson to Mr. Louis Kohn, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
53 Letter dated, March 27, 1960 to Hochschild Kohn and Co., Att: Public Relations Dept from Frances Kraus, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
54 Letter dated, March 27, 1960 from Mary Jane Simpson, MS2721, Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
55 On the 21 March 1960, South African police shot and killed 69 protesters in an anti-pass march in Sharpeville, a black segregated residential area south of Johannesburg. This event became known as the Sharpeville Massacre, and was covered in the Baltimore newspapers. In South Africa, it ushered in the period of “high apartheid,” defined through severe surveillance and repression of the black liberation struggle.
56 Letter dated, March 27, 1960 from Mrs W. Ainsworth Parker to Mr Louis Kohn, MS2721 Maryland Historical Society, 22–27 March 1960 Subject Files-Tea Room Integration (Letters For).
57 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic.
58 Ibid., 190. By the 1950s, US advertisers pitched products to the “Negro” consumer market with some commentators understanding access as a “route to integration”, see Nelson, “Forgotten Fifteen Million, 119; and see also Weems, Desegregating the Dollar. See for the relationship of consumer boycotts to labor organising, Frank, Purchasing Power. See also Skotnes ”’Buy Where You Can Work’.”
59 Jewish Museum of Maryland, Tips and Taps, January 1943; and Kramer, “White Sales.”
60 Jewish Museum of Maryland, Tips and Taps, July 1943.
61 Interview, Jewish Museum of Maryland, OH 364 Elaine Layden, August 23, 2000.
62 Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 26–33, discusses African American department store workers before WWII. She describes the jobs as menial and the work as “invisible” and mostly “away from the selling floor”, although she does account for some in “more-public jobs” such as elevator operators and waitresses (26).
63 Kreydatus, “You are a Part of All of Us,” 112; For domestic service and African American employment, see Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens; and Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom.
64 Kreydatus, “You are a Part of All of Us,” 111; and Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 27–8, 31–3.
65 Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 26–41.
66 Kreydatus, “You are a Part of All of Us”; For a different context of Philadelphia see Cooper, “The Limits of Persuasion”; and Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom.
67 Kenny, “Servicing a Racial Regime,” 103–7.
68 Kreydatus, “You are a Part of All of Us,” 110.
69 Simon argues that the labor of African Americans, as cleaners and sweepers, musicians and dancers, and most symbolically as push-chair operators, in the public space of the boardwalk in Atlantic City convinced white middle class holiday makers of their new-found respectability by being the recipients of such service, see Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams, 224, fn 14. See also Bjelopera, City of Clerks.
70 See Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 72–4, for the increase of African Americans into sales and clerical work by 1960, and especially Chapters 2–4, for the history nationally of the multiple efforts to open department stores to black sales workers.
71 For Baltimore, Tips and Taps issues from the 1960s, Jewish Museum of Maryland, shows the gradual promotion of African Americans into service and supervisory positions at Hutzler’s.
72 Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement.
73 Skotnes, “Buy Where you Can Work,” 736.
74 Ibid., 753. And see Skotnes, A New Deal for All? For the national context and other city movements, see Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 57–71; and Cooper, “Limits of Persuasion.”
75 See Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, 165. For the histories of union efforts in New York and Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s to desegregate sales jobs, see Chapter 3. In southern cities, worker-consumer alliances operated through informal and everyday practices to link interests in department store campaigns. By the 1950s and 1960s student sit-ins, the issue of jobs was engaged with in some cities, although often behind-the-scenes, see Chapter 5; see also Parker, “Southern Retail Campaigns” for how African American retail campaigns linked consumer and worker concerns to promote middle class respectability. For studies of union organizing among white workers in retail (in New York and Detroit), see Opler, For All White-Collar Workers; Frank, “Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Stores”; and Ziskind, “Labor Conflict in the Suburbs.”
76 MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough; and See Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door, especially Chapter 6, “Resistance in Retail” for a successful union organizing campaign by African American women workers in the late 1970s around labor rights in Woodward and Lathrop department store in Washington DC. Critical to the later success were changes to the sector in the 1970s, including precisely the increased hiring of young, black women service staff, but also declining wages and conditions (134).
77 Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 235. The racial redlining of Baltimore neighborhoods ensured these were primarily white neighborhoods, see Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood.
78 Meier, “Successful Sit-Ins,” 236.
79 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic.
80 Schmidt, “1960 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins,” 291.
81 Ibid., 293.
82 Ibid., 294.
83 It should be noted that by the 1980s and 1990s, in particular with the decision of Lechmere, Inc. vs. NLRB, the private property of stores justified limiting union organizers’ access to retail workers, see Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door, 149. Thus, access to stores – for commodities, services or (even) jobs – came to be differentiated from access to the labor relations therein.
84 Grundlingh, “’Are we Afrikaners getting too rich?’; O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 156; see Posel, “Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer,” for discussion of South Africa’s advertising and marketing industries, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
85 I follow the practice in South Africa of referring to “black” as including all those subjugated to oppression for their “race” under apartheid. I use the South African spelling for “coloured” to signal the specific meaning of it there. Official post-apartheid census classification maintains the following categories: Black-African, Coloured, Indian, and White. Historically, the category “black” included, in current census terms then, Black-African, coloured, and Indians.
86 ’I have written about the NUDW in Kenny, Retail Worker Politics. The NUDW was formed through an amalgamation of commercial unions across the country, which meant that it brought together different political traditions, including from Cape Town, where the Communist Party had a presence as well as the Rand, where branches supported the SA Labour Party. In 1943 in an historic strike characteristic of this period, the NUDW struck against OK Bazaars and other major retailers with the African Commercial and Distributive Workers Union, who organized black male distributive workers in the sector. After further legislative and repressive moves by the state, and under apartheid, African workers’ unions were suppressed until the 1970s. Depending on changes to regulation over the decades around racially integrated memberships, the NUDW represented coloured and Indian workers by different arrangement – sometimes within it, sometimes through “B” branches and sometimes through other unions – such as NUCAW. African workers could join registered trade unions only after 1979 reforms. The NUDW helped to set up the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers of South Africa (CCAWUSA) in 1975, which organized black workers independently. The NUDW’s national leadership during the period discussed was Ray Altman and Morris Kagan.
87 Van Vuuren, in Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, 1587. While I am using the broader category here, workers in the late 1960s were coloured and Indian.
88 Suzman, in Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, 1584; and see Kenny, Retail Worker Politics, 49–50.
89 Suzman, in Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, 1603.
90 Kenny, Retail Workers Politics; African workers were excluded from the definition of “employee” in the industrial relations system. They were regulated by the Bantu Labour Act, which carried punitive measures for exiting a contract or not carrying out the work of a contract, including fines and arrest, as a direct inheritance of masters and servants law. They had to carry a “pass” designating their access to employment and allowing them to be in urban areas. (Recall that the Sharpeville protests were organized against passes, fn 55 above). For a discussion of masters and servants law as foundational in South Africa, see Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture.
91 Industrial Correspondent, “Shopworkers in direct appeal,” Rand Daily Mail, June 3, 1969, AH1601/Pa.
92 Express Reporter, “Stores Reply: ‘Not enough Whites’,” Sunday Express, nd, 1969, AH 1601/Pa. See Kenny, Retail Worker Politics, 42–9, for a discussion of the factors contributing to changes to the labor market.
93 Express Reporter, “Stores Reply: ‘Not enough Whites’,” Sunday Express, nd, 1969, AH 1601/Pa.
94 “Editorial: The Effective Rate for the Job,” New Day, August 1970, 2–3, National Union of Distributive Workers (Natal Branch) Records 1937–1978 (AH1202); Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand/G1.
95 The National Party instead introduced amendments to the Bantu Labour Act to empower the Minister of Bantu Affairs to introduce job reservation through what would become the Bantu Laws Amendment Act.
96 “Transvaal Shop Hours 1968: S.A.B.C. ‘What’s Going On?’” transcript from interview by Colin du Plessis of Miss Dulcie M. Harwell, Saturday August 17, 1968. Mayibuye archives, Cape Town, Darcie Hartwell papers, 3.2.2, Box 1.
97 “Transvaal Shop Hours Commission Reports,” New Day, August 1970, p. 5, AH1202/G1.
98 See Posel, “Races to Consume,” for a different approach to the centrality of the regulation of consumption to the South African racial order.
99 She was referring to African workers generally, which is to say, workers who do not work in shops.
100 “Transvaal Shop Hours Commission Reports,” New Day, August 1970, p. 6; AH1202/G1.
101 Posel, “Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer,” suggests that by the late 1950s and 1960s, marketing and advertising firms, were, however, beginning to attempt to understand the “African consumer” as a market. My point speaks to public debate about black consumers access to retailing stores. Indeed, Sales House, a subsidiary of Edgars was set up in the mid-1960s specifically to sell clothing to urban black customers, as a segregated market, see Kenny, Retail Worker Politics, 34; Posel, 131.
102 For the centrality of white women’s femininity to Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, see Hyslop, “White Working-Class Women”; Hofmeyr, “Building a nation from words”; Du Toit, “The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism; Kenny, “Servicing Modernity”. For debate around “juvenile delinquency” linked to women’s entry into the labor market, see Mooney, “Die Eendstert Euwel.”
103 There is an extensive South African literature that documents the project of reforming “poor whites”, see Morrell, White but Poor; Roos, “Work Colonies”; du Plessis, “Afrikaner Nationalism, Print Culture”; Dubow, Scientific Racism; and for specific relations between working class and middle class white women see, Willoughby-Herard, “‘I’ll Give You Something to Cry About’.”
104 See Kenny, Retail Worker Politics, 27–59.
105 See Kenny, Retail Worker Politics for the implications of this history; and see, du Plessis, “Nation, Family, Intimacy.”
106 See for more context on the affective power of the servant in colonial relations, Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; McClintock, Imperial Leather; and Ally, “Ooh, eh eh.”
107 Kenny, Retail Worker Politics.
108 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 10.
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Bridget Kenny
Bridget Kenny is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She works on labor, gender, race and consumption with specific focus on service work, precarious employment, and political subjectivity. Her books include Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Wal-Mart in the Global South, co-edited with Carolina Bank-Munoz and Antonio Stecher (University of Texas Press, 2018).