Based on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.

本文根据媒体报道和工会运动，追踪了从 20 世纪 30 年代到 1970 年代围绕约翰内斯堡“女店员”的讨论。它认为，女店员是一个白人女性形象，通过再现阶级差异的持久紧张关系，使目前关于南非白人女性的大量文献变得复杂化。通过档案研究和访谈，本文展示了“女店员”如何对白人民族主义意识形态做出了贡献，这种意识形态更传统地关注母性和家庭生活。约翰内斯堡白人女工的具体劳动既依赖于她们的女性气质，又使得服务性工作的情感劳动成为与白人中产阶级女性消费者矛盾和争论的场所。因此，阶级差异可以通过消费和零售场所包含在白人民族的符号学中。