Regulating Retail: The Category “Employee” and Its Divisions

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

“…Downtown shopping was a social activity reinforced by the elegance of shops and city architecture. 39 As I describe elsewhere, "modern" retailing practices operated in South African chains by the 1930s, which standardized products, emphasized their imported status or their discount cost shown on price tags, and were offered up over the counter by an obliging service workforce. Retailers were European and Russian immigrants bringing experiences from elsewhere and required coordination and capital for importing goods.…”

“…Retailers were European and Russian immigrants bringing experiences from elsewhere and required coordination and capital for importing goods. 40 White women worked in these shops in service and clerical jobs, along with white men in sales and management, and Black men as distributive workers behind the scenes, loading, packing, and delivering goods. 41 More generally, white women entered the labor market in Johannesburg in this period, for instance, as garment workers, but shop assistants were selected from a higher-class category.…”

“…40 White women worked in these shops in service and clerical jobs, along with white men in sales and management, and Black men as distributive workers behind the scenes, loading, packing, and delivering goods. 41 More generally, white women entered the labor market in Johannesburg in this period, for instance, as garment workers, but shop assistants were selected from a higher-class category. They had higher education levels, spoke English, and had numeracy skills unlike proletarianizing farm daughters going into factories.…”

“…They had higher education levels, spoke English, and had numeracy skills unlike proletarianizing farm daughters going into factories. 42 The class difference was a defining characteristic constituting the sector, although the women were also working class, for instance, Maureen Williams went to work in Stuttafords in the early 1930s. She grew up in an orphanage and was sent to a women's lodging house and to find a job when she was sixteen.…”

“…I have argued elsewhere that white women's service labor in public arenas like shops worked to "familiarize" these places for a white settler public. 4 That is, white women shop assistants' femininity generated affective terrains of racialized belonging in department stores and city shopping districts, which integrated these spaces of consumption into the national imaginary of privilege, modernity, and memetic metropolitan life. This paper examines how the tensions of class, the enduring differences which the "shop girl" marked, belied an apparent transhistorical discourse of white femininity located primarily in its domesticity.…”