Servicing Modernity: White Women Shop Workers on the Rand and Changing Gendered Respectabilities, 1940s–1970s1

Kenny, Bridget

doi:10.1080/00020180802505012

Cited by 16 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…From the early 1900s, white working-class women entered Johannesburg retailing to assist their families (Berger 1992;Kenny 2008). White women provided an experience of shopping defined through respectability and gentility.…”

Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Women shop stewards and officials in the 1930s and 1940s fought around recognition, wages, health and safety issues, and shop trading hours. After a historic 1943 strike by white women workers, the NUDW gained recognition from many stores (Herd 1974;Kenny 2008).…”

Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…White women provided an experience of shopping defined through respectability and gentility. They had higher education levels than women doing factory work at the time, and their ability to speak and dress well were core to the provision of service in shops (Kenny 2008). 4 As a shop assistant who worked at Stuttafords in the 1930s told me: 'We had to dress … we had to buy our own clothes, and we had to look like somebody special, you know, very special at Stuttafords, because it was a beautiful shop, you see.'…”

Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on previous work -some archival, some interview, some ethnographic (Kenny 2004(Kenny , 2008(Kenny , 2009(Kenny , 2014 -this article traces the connections between these iterations. While each moment is not strictly parallel and I am not comparing like retail arenas, instances are chosen that have surfaced retail spaces in public debate through the role of the service worker -when arguments have been made for (or against) this figure and her importance to the experience of consumption -in order to suggest how consumption has integrally involved discussion of the polity.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

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Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption

Kenny

2015

Critical Arts

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This article argues for viewing debates about consumption -here specifically focused on retail spaces -as attachments to fantasies about participation. It uses the figure of the service worker as index, tracking how she appears and disappears at different historical moments in South African public discussions on consumption. Discussing four moments of debate where the service worker is represented in relation to commitments to consumption, the article argues that the figure stands in (variously) for what is at stake in claims to service and retail spaces. Paying attention to the shifting and sometimes shadowy figure of this worker in public debate, we can begin to comment on the longer history of ambivalence toward consumption, linked to labour, as well as recent triumphant claims to access to the market as sphere of democracy, for instance, in Wal-Mart's entry to South Africa.

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Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The 'Shop Girl': Domesticating Apartheid Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 94%

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Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption

Kenny

2015

Critical Arts

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“…6 These developments compounded the delegitimation of working-class identification in the postwar years. 7 By the 1960s, the NP's policies, in conjunction with rapid economic growth, had transformed the social structure of the Afrikaner population.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BaasorKlaas? Afrikaner Working-Class Responses to Transformation in South Africa, ca. 1977–2002

Zyl-Hermann

2014

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

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Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging

Kenny

2018

Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa

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Servicing Modernity: White Women Shop Workers on the Rand and Changing Gendered Respectabilities, 1940s–1970s1

Cited by 16 publications

References 16 publications

Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption

Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption

BaasorKlaas? Afrikaner Working-Class Responses to Transformation in South Africa, ca. 1977–2002

Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging

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