Aunt Jemima: The Advertising Campaign

The basic story was fleshed out and brilliantly illustrated through an advertising campaign in North American women’s magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. The ads were the work of James Webb Young, a legendary account executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Chicago, and N. C. Wyeth, the well-known painter and illustrator of such books as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans. The full-page color advertisements ran regularly in Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post and told tales of the leisure and splendor of the plantation South, complete with grand balls, huge dinners, and visitors dropping in from across the region. Not too subtly, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, a labor-saving product, was marketed with comparisons to a time and place when some American white women had access to the ultimate labor-saving device: a slave. A line from a 1927 product display read, “Make them with Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour, and your family will ask where you got your wonderful southern cook.”