Mammies, Ayahs, Baboes: Postcards of Racialized Nursemaids from the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Why did early twentieth-century White Euro/American cultural representations across colonial empires construct “colored” and colonized nursemaids in certain similar ways? In this article, the author examines visual depictions of three particular gendered and racialized domestic servants – the African-American mammy, the South-Asian ayah, and the Indonesian baboe—in the emergent visual medium of the picture-postcard. Despite differences in the historical lives and labors of actual mammies, ayahs, and baboes, all three figures were exoticized, desexualized, and sentimentalized in Euro/American visual imagination. A comparative reading of postcards brings together North American and European imperial histories of interracial caregiving – histories that are typically studied separately in area-studies contexts. By mass-circulating stereotypes of non-White nursemaids, and by naturalizing non-White women’s labors in White homes, ephemeral picture-postcards played a role in globally upholding the domestic and political economies of gender, race, and empire.