Wise Mothers and Wise Buyers
Marketing Tea and Home Improvement in 1930s South Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8977663 |
|---|---|
| Authors | K Carline (0000-0002-9382-4986, Michigan State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 291-308 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s002185372200055x |
| OpenAlex | W4306153816 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 30 |
Histories of advertising in Africa focus on the postwar and postcolonial periods. This essay examines an innovative marketing campaign in South Africa's eastern Cape in the 1930s. The campaign reveals congruence and conflict between increased marketing of consumer goods to African households and the contemporaneous growth of women's home improvement societies. The newspaper Umlindi we Nyanga used testimonials and written competitions to sell its Ambrosia brand of tea to rural women. Advertisers and consumers drew on local meanings of tea consumption and debates about feminine respectability to present tea-drinking women as ‘intelligent’ and ‘wise mothers’. The emphasis on intelligence linked tea to literacy, in part because text-based consumer culture offered rural women a way to visibly consume socially respectable goods. The essay concludes with a close examination of two testimonials written by leaders of home improvement societies, which hint at the contradictions implicit in the commercialization of the ‘wise mother’
Advertising · Business · Commercialization · Consumption (sociology · Literacy · Newspaper · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Xhosa · African history and culture studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Marketing · South African History and Culture
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Bantu World and the origins of a captive African commercial press in South Africa
African Print Cultures
The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women
The hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life’
Fork Up and Smile’
Ambiguous Repositories
Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer
Housewives, Maids or Mothers
Poverty and Respectability in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town
Working-Class Respectability
Dressing Up
The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa
Who Belongs to the ‘Star People’? Negotiating Beer and Gin Advertisements in West Africa , 1949– 75
Cooperative Rule
South Africa's Alternative Press
An African American 'Mother of the Nation
A World of Letters
The Roots of African Nationalism in the Cape Colony
Umteteli wa Bantuand the constitution of social publics in the 1920s and 1930s
Beneath the Surface
Zenzele
Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |