The Mammy Stereotype and Aunt Jemima

Introduction

Notions about the Black matriarch and domesticity drive the creation of the mammy stereotype. Enslaved Black women were heavily abused and labored for hours in hot, detached plantation kitchens.¹ In stark contrast, the “Old South” was glorified in the eyes of postbellum Southerners, thus, in their collective memory, the enslaved Black woman was regarded as merely a “happy, loyal Mammy.”²

Chris L. Rutt and Charles G. Underwood, the owners of the Pearl Milling Company, were looking for a trademark for their self-rising pancake mix. In 1889, Rutt attended a minstrel show where the song “Old Aunt Jemima” was performed.³ In the show, the Aunt Jemima character was highly superstitious and fearful of all advances in technology. She also acted as the highly skilled cook for what Maurice Manring describes as “an idealized version of the Old South.”⁴

Rutt and Underwood proceeded to use this mammy caricature as the face of their product. Manring argues that the mammy figure of Aunt Jemima “soothed guilt over slavery, kept white women out of the kitchen, and put hot food on the table. Like the real slave woman, she saved whites from work.”⁵

With Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, the Pearl Milling Company was not only selling a product, they were selling a narrative. In 1893, Nancy Green, a formerly enslaved woman and servant for a Chicago judge, was signed to play Aunt Jemima at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.⁶ There, she cooked pancakes for guests, sang, and told stories of “Aunt Jemima’s” life on the plantation, some of them real experiences from her own enslavement.⁷ 

Green’s portrait was used as a “pleasant”’ logo on all Aunt Jemima products, and her slave stories combined with imagined stories of the South to create the legend of Aunt Jemima. Purd Wright created the first Aunt Jemima backstory, which said that she protected the South and calmed tensions during the Civil War by serving northerners some of her pancakes.⁸

Many other women played the role of Aunt Jemima after Nancy Green’s death in 1925. Each woman followed the pattern of weaving their personal life stories into the legend of Aunt Jemima, to the point where the origins of the character began to blur and countless Black women had their identities lost to a fictional figure.⁹

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Analysis

Particularly noticeable in the television advertisements for Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, the company placed a large amount of emphasis on the ease of the product. A consumer only has to mix water and the pancake mix and will then have a full meal to serve for their family.¹⁰ Essentially, Aunt Jemima removes the labor of cooking from the consumer — namely the white woman — just as enslaved Black women did the labor for their white enslavers. Aunt Jemima Pancake mix was selling white families a modern mammy.¹¹ This is made more explicit in the first image, as a painting of Aunt Jemima serving her master is a key aspect of the advertisement.¹² 

The second advert says one can get a coupon for a “funny Aunt Jemima Rag Doll” after buying a package of pancake flour.¹³ The third and fourth images show how Aunt Jemima expanded into other kitchen products, a salt shaker and syrup specifically.¹⁴ Similar to a live-in servant or a mammy, Aunt Jemima was present in all aspects of the home, from the rest of the kitchen to a child’s playroom. Aunt Jemima was saving the white woman from labor throughout their daily lives, and therefore, the Black woman was effectively reduced to nothing more than her ability to serve other (white) people. 

Aunt Jemima caricatures and ad campaigns were released as Black women across the country were fighting for food security in their communities. As they worked in food justice, they were consistently dragged down by white America’s perception of them as mammy’s; not only did Black women have to combat hunger and oppression in the Black community, they also had to fight against having their labor and personalities being reduced and intertwined with Aunt Jemima.