Historical Methods

Historical methods are used in qualitative research to answer research questions that require an understanding of past events. Archival research can answer specific questions about populations over differing time periods. Below, I describe data generated from an artifact that I used to answer a proposed research question: How did advertisements during the early 1900s utilize racial stereotypes that embodied domesticity to sell food products, and how were these stereotypes used to target white housewives as consumers?

Artifact Description

Advertisement from the New York Times, January 19, 1919

Artifact Title: “Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour,”

Target Audience: Although it is not explicitly mentioned in this ad, the target audience is most likely white middle class women. This can be inferred by analyzing the advertisements that surround this ad, which feature women’s fashion trends, and other ads from this time period.

Location: This artifact can be found in the The New York Times, from January 19th, 1919. The New York Times is a newspaper, published in the United States continuously since September 18, 1851 to present day. It is one of the most prominent and highly circulated newspapers in the United States. This artifact was accessed in the Library of Congress digital archives under the section “Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919.”

Ideas of Domesticity: The fact that the white family eating the pancakes, presumably provided to them by the black woman on the box, is an interesting aspect of this ad that can be used to answer the above research question. The ad suggests that a smart housewife should feed her children a “ready-made mixture” that is both economically good and good for children with healthy appetites. This ad suggests that by buying the pancake mix, women can decrease the time they have to spend in the kitchen and give their children a nutritious meal.

Race Relations: This advertisement provokes questions about the advertiser’s motivations for using Aunt Jemima, a black woman dressed in traditional rural southern clothing, as the prominent image for their brand and their product. It is possible that the advertisers were tapping into racial stereotypes of the 1920s that depicted blacks as laborers, relating to the social hierarchy that was evident in the South during this time period.

Data Analysis

Further Research

To continue forward with this research, I would need to analyze other advertisements that featured images of other racial identities from the 1920s and possibly previous and following decades (1910 – 1930). The archives I used on the Library of Congress featured only newspapers (most were from the New York Times). For this particular research question, I may also want to analyze advertisements in other media including newspapers from other regions of the US, magazines, store ads, etc. My search would also have to include an analysis of advertisements primarily featuring white bodies in order to understand the contexts in which advertisers chose to not use African Americans or people of other races in their publications. Since the depiction of otherness, difference and race in advertising is a broad research topic, I would likely have to narrow my research to ads that primarily feature food related products during the 1920s, or I could potentially narrow my research question further by studying the deception of Aunt Jemima in advertising and how it has changed over time. It may also be interesting to analyze the difference in ads from different regions of the US, for instance if African Americans were shown differently in magazines or newspapers in the south vs the north.