M.M. Manring. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. ix + 210 pp. $47.50, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8139-1782-5.
Reviewed by Kate Cliford Larson
Published on H-Grad (November, 1998)
Quaker Oats's Aunt Jemima has been a na‐ for blacks and whites, often centering on stereo‐ tional fgure for nearly a century, her image em‐ typical images of black women and men and their blazoned on packages of pancake mix and related roles in white plantation life. Manring asserts that products, ofering consumers (women) a shortcut the image of Aunt Jemima is an interesting mani‐ to cooking success in a kitchen devoid of servants. festation of the ante- and post-bellum minstrel This happy, loving, resourceful mammy, who nev‐ show: a ready made mammy that met the racial, er really existed, has been so successful selling gendered and class expectations of a white middle ready-made pancake mix that she has persisted as class learning to cope with fewer servants and part of our national popular culture for over one modernized kitchens. The mammy image, howev‐ hundred years. Through print, radio and televi‐ er, has been and still is a particularly painful one sion advertisements and personal appearances by for African-Americans. As a symbol of subordina‐ actresses portraying her, Aunt Jemima has cooked tion of black women under slavery and as domes‐ up a comforting batch of pancakes, easing the tic laborers after emancipation, the scarf-capped, burden for white women and securing the hearth overweight, jolly mammy has been a constant re‐ for white men (or so the ads implied). In Slave In minder of white oppression. Manring also argues A Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, M.M. that this racialized mammy stereotype should Manring argues that this icon of the devoted slave seem out of place in the 1990s, but Aunt Jemima mammy, an indefatigable image of a manufac‐ persists because notions about race and gender tured ante-bellum plantation fantasy, appealed to are still deeply rooted in our national culture. the national white consciousness during post-bel‐ Covering a broad range of issues in a tight, lum waves of reconciliation. Eager to transform highly readable book, Manring roots the analysis the conficts of the Civil War and the world of in historical scholarship in the categories of race, ante-bellum slavery into a fctional memory of a class and gender. By using a cross disciplinary ap‐ benevolent, leisurely Old South, the white cre‐ proach, combining historical research, cultural ators of Aunt Jemima reinterpreted plantation life H-Net Reviews and gender studies, advertising theory, and busi‐ happy, helpful slaves and contented, genteel mas‐ ness case analysis, Manring documents Aunt Jemi‐ ters, complemented a racialized middle-class do‐ ma's "birth" in 1889 as the brand name and image mesticity, where white women were eager to ease for a new self-rising four product. By examining their burdens in the kitchen with a "slave in a a century's worth of advertising copy created by box." Aunt Jemima in a box allowed white women various advertising agencies and the corporate access to another person's labor and culture, but records of companies that have owned the prod‐ not their station in life. These advertisements uct and its advertising images, particularly the were rooted, Manring says, in the psychological Quaker Oats Company, Manring reveals the delib‐ need of middle-class housewives for the "secret erate manipulation of the public in turn-of-the- recipe" and the black woman^s labor. Aunt Jemi‐ century mass marketing campaigns that created ma, as the "slave of a wealthy southern gentle‐ huge consumer demand for ready made products. man, [brought] a mythical world to life again." (p. By confating notions about race, class and gender 139) By eliminating the white mistress from the these advertising strategies appealed to a national ads, Manring argues that white women could buy white consciousness devoted to reconciliation af‐ this product and, in efect, buy the fantasy as well. ter the Civil War and Reconstruction. Early ads encouraged white housewives to imag‐ Manring frst traces the creation of the legend ine themselves as the mistress, "to have Aunt of Aunt Jemima, her "life" on the plantation, her Jemima, not to be Aunt Jemima" (p. 139). The con‐ emancipation and the sale of her famous, secret tinued success of the ads throughout the 1920s pancake recipe to technologically advanced and 1930s hinged on their appeal to white wom‐ northern millers. Aunt Jemima was frst con‐ en's sense of identity as providers for their hus‐ ceived by Chris Rutt in 1889 in St. Joseph, Mis‐ bands and families, which, Manring argues, is souri. With his partner Charles Underwood, Rutt deeply imbedded in the social construction of began marketing a self-rising four but lacked a whiteness and white womanhood. The mammy brand name. According to Quaker Oats Company fgure, in myth and as shown in early Aunt Jemi‐ legend, Rutt strolled into a minstrel show one day ma advertisements, is only represented within the and witnessed a white man in blackface, dressed white household, not as a nurturing, loving moth‐ in drag singing "Old Aunt Jemima." Though many er in her own home. would believe that Rutt^s chance encounter with Rather than just a detailed history of an ad‐ "Aunt Jemima" is a "happy coincidence," Manring vertising campaign, Manring expands the analysis argues that Rutt actually "tapped into major with historical, cultural and gender analysis. Ex‐ trends in the nation's popular culture and indus‐ amining the complex interplay and confation of try" (pp. 61-62). Aunt Jemima was a ready-made race, class and gender by the advertising industry, image, well suited to the marketing of a labor-sav‐ Manring interprets the cultural, social and histori‐ ing pre-mixed pancake four that re-created down cal construction of Aunt Jemima. Manring argues home southern hospitality. The author also draws that these Aunt Jemima plantation narratives, and a provocative parallel between the white "inter‐ the fabricated history of her life, persisted far locutor" of the early minstrel show who interpret‐ longer than would have been expected. Well into ed black life and speech for the white audience the 1920s and 1930s, Quaker Oats continued to and the advertising script that used a white voice market this secret "plantation" recipe. It is here to interpret the fractured speech of Aunt Jemima. that Manring has developed a convincing argu‐ The nostalgic imagery of the Old South, with ment. This racialized mammy image provided its abundant plantation culture, teeming with more than a nostalgic look back to the ante-bel‐ lum plantation and its legendary Southern hospi‐
2 H-Net Reviews tality. The construction of Aunt Jemima's image is lations encoded in the image of the mammy. The one example of the historical repression of the advertising campaign constructed and then rein‐ memory of slavery. The Aunt Jemima of the early forced white women's perception that they need‐ advertisements is a representation of plantation ed, wanted, and deserved good help in the life that demonstrates in a very concrete manner kitchen, particularly in the service of men. In the the remarkable ways that white control over act of purchasing Aunt Jemima in the box, white memory can distort history. Not only in depictions women were in efect buying the labor of a black of benevolent plantation life, but also in the per‐ servant, reinforcing their sense of white superior‐ petuation of stereotypical black images, which ity. deny African-Americans their right to an histori‐ There are a few problems with this book. cal identity of their own. Marketing research re‐ Scholars looking for a very detailed analysis of ports from the 1930s indicate Quaker Oats cared national reconciliation, the advertising industry little about the negative connotations the mammy as a whole, consumerism at the turn-of-the-centu‐ image held for African-Americans. The fact that ry, or a post-modern look at representation will her image persisted through the Civil Rights not fnd it here. There are too few illustrations; I movement, through boycotts and calls for "her" often found myself wishing I could see the de‐ retirement, reveals the tenacity of the institution‐ tailed images that Manring so carefully describes, al and cultural devaluation of black women this though restrictions on the use of images may have image perpetuates. played a role here. Though Manring does spend Manring draws on many historical and liter‐ the last part of the book dealing with the histori‐ ary sources to trace the evolution of the mammy cal response of African-Americans to the image image. Recent scholarship on slavery and slave and the product, I also found myself wanting to women has shown this stereotypical image to be know more. That said, this is a highly readable false and does not refect the reality of slave wom‐ narrative and may be quite appropriate as a sec‐ en's lives. The fctional life of Aunt Jemima, a gen‐ ondary reading for a variety of courses. I found erous mammy who endured slavery and the Civil Manring's interdisciplinary approach very in‐ War and who served slaveowners and northern triguing. emancipators alike, blurred with reality as the on‐ Manring asks, in conclusion, why, when this going serial nature of the advertisements became racialized image is so ofensive to African Ameri‐ more detailed and historical in their content. The cans and the plantation mythology is no longer historical fction appealed to the consumer, who valid, does Quaker Oats persist in using her im‐ understood and could decode the social construct age? Though she has recently been updated with of a racialized image. As Patricia Hill Collins has a new hairdo, trimmed down and aged to look noted, the mammy image was "[c]reated to justify more like a grandmother, Quaker Oats insists that the economic exploitation of house slaves and her image is now racially neutral. M. M. Manring sustained to explain Black women's long-standing disagrees, and so do I. It is time to let Aunt Jemi‐ restriction to domestic service...[and] the mammy ma out of the box and set her free. symbolizes the dominant group's perceptions of Notes the ideal black female relationship to elite white male power." Collins also notes that the fctional [1]. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist mammy, though an authority fgure, "still knows Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Poli‐ her 'place' as obedient servant."[1] Manring tics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991, shows how advertisers counted on white women's 71. ability to decode the racial, gendered and class re‐
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Citation: Kate Cliford Larson. Review of Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. H-Grad, H-Net Reviews. November, 1998.
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