The Bitchionary

For four episodes we've been building context—the machinery of modern branding, the minstrel stage, the taxonomy of caricature, the fair and its gate. All of it was in service of this. Now we come back to the woman.

The part people sort of know is that Nancy Green walked into a casting call in 1893 and spent the next thirty years traveling the country as the living face of a company's invention. This episode is about everything else. She was a founding presence at what became the largest Black congregation in the United States. She put her money into missionary work and anti-poverty programs. She was involved in anti-lynching crusades, which is to say she was doing, with the wages the costume paid her, a version of the work Ida B. Wells was doing outside the fair's gates. The two of them lived in the same city for decades. They are buried in the same cemetery.

She died in 1923, at eighty-nine, still working, struck by a car on a Chicago street. She was buried in an unmarked plot because there was no money for a stone and no family left to arrange one. It stayed unmarked for ninety-seven years.

In 2020, asked whether they would help mark that grave, the company said: "Nancy Green and Aunt Jemima aren't the same. Aunt Jemima is a fictitious character." This episode is partly about why they say it exactly that way, and what it has cost to keep saying it.

This is the last episode of the arc, and it is a heavy one.

In this episode we:

• Follow Green after the fair, the thirty-year contract, the county fairs and grocery demonstrations, and the format the company built by lifting the minstrel character off the theatrical stage and putting it to work in retail

• Tell the other half of her life: the church, the funding, the anti-lynching work, and the Chicago she shared with Ida B. Wells

• Follow the fifteen-year search for Green's grave, the five more years it took to find a descendant and get a headstone approved under Illinois law, and who finally paid for the stone

• Name the women who came after her—at least nine over seventy years, including a blues singer with her own recording career, a woman whose face the company redesigned the logo to resemble without ever putting her name on the box, and one who worked a pancake house at Disneyland

• Lay out the labor the Mammy image was built to conceal: roughly 90 percent of employed Black women working as domestic laborers, and the deliberate exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the New Deal protections, which was the price Southern Democrats charged for their votes

• Connect the 2014 lawsuit to the 2020 answer at the gravesite, and to the trademark PepsiCo still owns and has no intention of releasing

There is no justice at the end of this one. There is a name, and the fact that we now know it, and what we do with that kind of looking from here.

If you're just finding us, start at Part 1.

Content note: This episode discusses slavery, racial caricature, lynching, racialized economic exploitation, and the legal and policy structures that excluded Black women from labor protections. We have approached this material with care and encourage listeners to do the same.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources available in the show notes for parts 1-3.

In Part 3 we mapped the architecture—where the controlling images came from, what they were built to do, and where they went when the minstrel stage went dark. This episode goes back to the place where the pancake brand was launched, and to the three people standing in three different positions relative to the same gate.

In the spring of 1893, Chicago built a city out of plaster and painted it white. Twenty-seven million people came to see it over six months. It was America announcing itself as a modern civilization that had arrived, and like every vision, it was a set of decisions about what to include and what to leave out. Black leaders had been lobbying for years for a place in it—a commissioner, a department, some way to show what Black Americans had built in the not-quite-thirty years since emancipation. They were refused. Not carelessly, and not once.

Three Black Americans were at that fair anyway, and they gave three completely different answers to the same impossible question. Ida B. Wells stood outside the gates handing out a pamphlet about why they weren't inside. Frederick Douglass was inside at seventy-five, representing Haiti, because his own country wouldn't have him. And Nancy Green was inside too, in an apron, making pancakes and telling stories about how much she had loved the plantation.

Do you take the platform you're offered and try to work from within it, or do you refuse it and fight for a different one? There is no correct answer. There is only what each of them did with what was available to them.

This one is heavy.

In this episode we:

• Walk the World's Columbian Exposition. 690 acres of marshland turned into a city in under two years, electric light most visitors had never seen, the first Ferris wheel, and the hamburger, Cracker Jack, and Aunt Jemima pancake mix all launched in the same six months

• Trace the multi-year campaign by Black leaders for representation at the fair, the specific refusals that met it, and the incoherent reasoning offered for each one

• Cover Jubilee Day—the single day set aside for Black visitors—and the watermelons someone arranged to distribute at the gate, including where that particular piece of racist iconography actually came from, which is the opposite of what you'd assume

• Read from Frederick Douglass's speech that day, which began as prepared remarks and became something else entirely after a white man in the crowd heckled him about "the Negro problem"

• Meet Ida B. Wells properly: the train, the bite, the lawsuit, the lynching of her three friends in Memphis, the destruction of her newspaper office, and the pamphlet she wrote, funded, translated, and handed out at the fair's gates

• Look at the Dahomey Village, one of the fair's most popular attractions, and what it was built to prove about the distance between "there" and "here"

The White City burned in 1894. The structure it was built to display did not.

Next time, we close the arc: the rest of Nancy Green's life, the women who played the role after her, the labor the whole apparatus was designed to conceal, and what the company did with the brand after it announced it was done with it.

Content note: This episode discusses slavery, racial caricature, lynching and the systematic terror of the post-Reconstruction era, racist iconography, and the public display of human beings as ethnographic exhibition. We have approached this material with care and encourage listeners to do the same.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources listed in the show notes for Parts 1-3.

In Part 2, we walked through the minstrel show and met its cast of characters. This episode picks up exactly where that left off, and asks the harder question: what were those characters for, and where did they go when the minstrel stage finally went dark? The answer is that they didn't go anywhere. They just got new costumes and they're still all around us.

This episode is a direct continuation of Part 2, and it is a heavy one.

Content note: This episode discusses slavery, sexual violence, racial caricature, and racist stereotypes in historical context. It includes discussion of lynching, the systematic terror of the post-Reconstruction era, and modern racialized violence and policing. We have approached this material with care and encourage listeners to do the same.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

ABC News. "The untold story of the real 'Aunt Jemima' and the fight to preserve her legacy."

African American Registry. "Nancy Green, The Original 'Aunt Jemima' born."

Allrecipes. "The Brand Formerly Known as 'Aunt Jemima' Becomes Pearl Milling Company."

Banks, Nina. "Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination." Economic Policy Institute.

Bogle, Donald. “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films.” 1973.

CBS News Boston. "Aunt Jemima Brand And Logo Being Retired By Quaker Oats, Acknowledging Racial Stereotype."

Collins, Patricia Hill. “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.” 1990. 

EBSCO Research Starters. "Mammy archetype" by Elizabeth Mohn.

Fiveable Class Notes. "Domestic work and labor exploitation | History of Black Women in America."

Kentucky Center for African American Heritage. "Nancy Green."

Kentucky Historical Society. "Civil War to Civil Rights: Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima."

Lee, Jon J. "Racism and Trademark Abandonment." The George Washington Law Review.

London College of Contemporary Arts (LCCA). "A history of branding."

Morrison, Toni. “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.” 1992.

New-York Historical Society. "Aunt Jemima." Women & the American Story.

New-York Historical Society. "Black Domestic Workers." Women & the American Story.

Richardson, Riché. "Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of 'Aunt Jemima'?" The New York Times.

Roberts, Sam. "Overlooked No More: Nancy Green, the 'Real Aunt Jemima'." The New York Times.

Pearl Milling Company. "Our History."

PR Newswire. "Aunt Jemima Brand To Remove Image From Packaging And Change Brand Name." The Quaker Oats Company.

US Legal Forms. "Aunt Jemima Doctrine: Understanding Trademark Protection." Legal Resources.

University of Washington Digital Collections. "Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918."

Wikipedia. "Aunt Jemima."

Wikipedia. "Mammy stereotype."

Wilmington College. "Powered by Pancakes: Debra Faulk to Share the True Story of Aunt Jemima."

World’s Fair Chicago 1893. "Remembering Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima, and the 1893 World’s Fair."

"The Enduring Iconography of Exploitation: Aunt Jemima, Racial Mythology, and the History of American Consumption." Research Summary.

"The Real Aunt Jemima." Podcast Script/Research Materials.

"The Real Aunt Jemima: Nancy Green’s Story and the Legacy of a Stereotype." Historical Research Analysis.

In Part 1, we met Nancy Green, the woman hired to become America's first living trademark. To understand what she was actually performing at that 24-foot flour barrel, and why it worked so powerfully on white audiences, we have to go back further. Before the brand. Before the fair. Back to the minstrel stage.

This episode is a direct continuation of Part 1, and it's a heavy one. 

In this episode we:

• Trace the origins and structure of the American minstrel show, the dominant popular entertainment of the 19th century

• Examine the cast of characters it produced: the Mammy, Uncle Tom, the Jezebel, the Pickaninny, Jim Crow

• Unpack what each character was built to hide and what realities about slavery and its aftermath they were designed to make invisible

• Explore the role of sexual violence in the institution of slavery, and the specific myths constructed to mask it

These were not the casual racism of an unthinking era. They were tools, constructed with purpose. Once you see their architecture, you can't unsee them  because they didn't end when minstrel shows did.

Content note: This episode discusses slavery, sexual violence, racial caricature, and racist stereotypes in historical context. It includes discussion of lynching and the systematic terror of the post-Reconstruction era. We have approached this material with care and encourage listeners to do the same.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

ABC News. "The untold story of the real 'Aunt Jemima' and the fight to preserve her legacy."

African American Registry. "Nancy Green, The Original 'Aunt Jemima' born."

Allrecipes. "The Brand Formerly Known as 'Aunt Jemima' Becomes Pearl Milling Company."

Banks, Nina. "Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination." Economic Policy Institute.

CBS News Boston. "Aunt Jemima Brand And Logo Being Retired By Quaker Oats, Acknowledging Racial Stereotype."

Collins, Patricia Hill. "Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment"

EBSCO Research Starters. "Mammy archetype" by Elizabeth Mohn.

Fiveable Class Notes. "Domestic work and labor exploitation | History of Black Women in America."

Kentucky Center for African American Heritage. "Nancy Green."

Kentucky Historical Society. "Civil War to Civil Rights: Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima."

Lee, Jon J. "Racism and Trademark Abandonment." The George Washington Law Review.

London College of Contemporary Arts (LCCA). "A history of branding."

New-York Historical Society. "Aunt Jemima." Women & the American Story.

New-York Historical Society. "Black Domestic Workers." Women & the American Story.

Richardson, Riché. "Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of 'Aunt Jemima'?" The New York Times.

Roberts, Sam. "Overlooked No More: Nancy Green, the 'Real Aunt Jemima'." The New York Times.

Pearl Milling Company. "Our History."

PR Newswire. "Aunt Jemima Brand To Remove Image From Packaging And Change Brand Name." The Quaker Oats Company.

US Legal Forms. "Aunt Jemima Doctrine: Understanding Trademark Protection." Legal Resources.

University of Washington Digital Collections. "Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918."

Wikipedia. "Aunt Jemima."

Wikipedia. "Mammy stereotype."

Wilmington College. "Powered by Pancakes: Debra Faulk to Share the True Story of Aunt Jemima."

World’s Fair Chicago 1893. "Remembering Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima, and the 1893 World’s Fair."

"The Enduring Iconography of Exploitation: Aunt Jemima, Racial Mythology, and the History of American Consumption." Research Summary.

"The Real Aunt Jemima: Nancy Green’s Story and the Legacy of a Stereotype." Historical Research Analysis.

This season begins with a woman most of us were never taught about, though many of us grew up seeing the character she was hired to perform.

Nancy Green was born enslaved in Kentucky in 1834. In 1893, at the Chicago World’s Fair, she became America’s first “living trademark,” portraying the fictional figure known as Aunt Jemima.

This episode lays the foundation for a multi-part series. In this first episode we

We begin with Nancy Green’s life.We trace the industrialization of food production.We examine the birth of modern branding and trademark law.We introduce the minstrel traditions that shaped the Aunt Jemima character.

And we begin to ask harder questions about plantation nostalgia, racial caricature, and the foundational, yet marginalized,  labor of Black women in American history.

This is an intentionally dense episode. We are building context before we go deeper.

In the coming episodes, we’ll explore:

• Minstrelsy and the “mammy” myth

• The politics of representation at the 1893 World’s Fair

• The economic realities of Black women’s labor

• The evolution of the Aunt Jemima brand and its 2021 retirement

This series is not about canceling a logo. It’s about understanding how and why it was invented and what the larger cultural implications of that invention were..

Content note: This episode discusses slavery, racial caricature, and racist stereotypes in historical context.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

ABC News. "The untold story of the real 'Aunt Jemima' and the fight to preserve her legacy."

African American Registry. "Nancy Green, The Original 'Aunt Jemima' born."

Allrecipes. "The Brand Formerly Known as 'Aunt Jemima' Becomes Pearl Milling Company."

Banks, Nina. "Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination." Economic Policy Institute.

CBS News Boston. "Aunt Jemima Brand And Logo Being Retired By Quaker Oats, Acknowledging Racial Stereotype."

EBSCO Research Starters. "Mammy archetype" by Elizabeth Mohn.

Fiveable Class Notes. "Domestic work and labor exploitation | History of Black Women in America."

Kentucky Center for African American Heritage. "Nancy Green."

Kentucky Historical Society. "Civil War to Civil Rights: Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima."

Lee, Jon J. "Racism and Trademark Abandonment." The George Washington Law Review.

London College of Contemporary Arts (LCCA). "A history of branding."

New-York Historical Society. "Aunt Jemima." Women & the American Story.

New-York Historical Society. "Black Domestic Workers." Women & the American Story.

Richardson, Riché. "Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of 'Aunt Jemima'?" The New York Times.

Roberts, Sam. "Overlooked No More: Nancy Green, the 'Real Aunt Jemima'." The New York Times.

Pearl Milling Company. "Our History."

PR Newswire. "Aunt Jemima Brand To Remove Image From Packaging And Change Brand Name." The Quaker Oats Company.

US Legal Forms. "Aunt Jemima Doctrine: Understanding Trademark Protection." Legal Resources.

University of Washington Digital Collections. "Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918."

Wikipedia. "Aunt Jemima."

Wikipedia. "Mammy stereotype."

Wilmington College. "Powered by Pancakes: Debra Faulk to Share the True Story of Aunt Jemima."

World’s Fair Chicago 1893. "Remembering Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima, and the 1893 World’s Fair."

"The Enduring Iconography of Exploitation: Aunt Jemima, Racial Mythology, and the History of American Consumption." Research Summary.

"The Real Aunt Jemima." Podcast Script/Research Materials.

"The Real Aunt Jemima: Nancy Green’s Story and the Legacy of a Stereotype." Historical Research Analysis.

In the final episode of Witches to Trad Wives, we bring this series to its present-day conclusion.

Across these episodes, we’ve traced how fear of women repeatedly organizes itself into moral panic—each time wearing a new, era-appropriate costume. What begins as witchcraft becomes medical diagnosis, criminal spectacle, political threat, and wartime anxiety. Today, that same fear reappears as something softer and more palatable: the tradwife.

In this episode, we examine how tradwife culture functions not as a neutral lifestyle trend, but as the latest iteration of an old containment strategy—one that reframes submission as empowerment, domesticity as freedom, and hierarchy as harmony. Drawing connections between Cold War conservatism, anti-feminist organizing, reproductive panic, and social-media aesthetics, we name the pattern beneath the panic.

This episode closes the Witches to Trad Wives arc by asking why women’s gains are so often followed by systems designed to quietly take power back.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

In WWII, German soldiers on the Eastern Front whispered about witches in the night—figures who arrived silently and dropped bombs before vanishing into the dark.

They were real.

In this episode, we tell the story of the Night Witches, an all-female Soviet night bomber regiment that flew obsolete wooden planes with no radar, no parachutes, and almost no support. Facing relentless sexism and brutal conditions, these women adapted, innovated, and helped turn the tide of the war.

This is a story about women erased from history, brilliance misread as magic, and what happens when women are underestimated and fight anyway.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

https://invisiblewomen.ca/marina-raskova/

https://wrightmuseum.org/the-soviet-night-witches/

https://www.history.com/articles/meet-the-night-witches-the-daring-female-pilots-who-bombed-nazis-by-night

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/night-witches-soviet-women-pilots-who-terrified-nazi-soldiers

In this episode, we turn the Jack the Ripper story inside out—not to mythologize a faceless killer, but to restore the lives of the five women history reduced to “canonical victims.” Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly lived full, complicated, often heartbreaking lives in a Victorian world obsessed with policing women’s morality.

Instead of accepting the familiar true-crime script, we follow their real stories: poverty, alcoholism, workhouse systems built to punish, relationships marked by love and loss, and the relentless moral scrutiny that made them easy to dismiss both in life and in death. Through their histories, we expose a deeper truth: the panic that gripped London wasn’t just about a killer, it was about women who lived outside the lines Victorian culture demanded they stay within.

This is not an episode about him. It’s about them: women worth remembering for who they were, not how they died.

Connect with Us!

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Apple Podcasts:⁠ ⁠The Bitchionary⁠⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Patreon:⁠ ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Hallie Rubenhold, Doubleday 2019.

What happens when women’s knowledge threatens men’s power?

This episode follows the shift from witches and midwives to medical degrees and “scientific authority,” revealing how the medical establishment grew by excluding the very women who had been healing for centuries. We also trace the surprising moral panic around women on bicycles—and how these old anxieties still animate today’s gender politics.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5880931/the-19th-century-health-scare-that-told-women-to-worry-about-bicycle

https://cyclehistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/women-on-the-move-cycling-and-the-rational-dress-movement/

https://web.archive.org/web/20191102003132/https://garethrees.org/2012/01/10/shadwell/

Or The Witch Who Wouldn’t Die

In 1684, in a Puritan town in Massachusetts, a woman named Mary Webster was accused of witchcraft.

Poor, outspoken, and “not the most placid,” she became an easy target for her neighbors’ fears. What followed was one of the strangest and most revealing stories of the colonial witch-hunt era—one that would echo through centuries of women’s resistance.

This Halloween bonus episode tells her story: the trial, the mob, and the myth that would later inspire Margaret Atwood’s poem Half-Hanged Mary.

Connect with Us!

Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/TheBitchionary⁠

Instagram ⁠@theb.chionary⁠

Substack: ⁠https://thebitchionary.substack.com/⁠

Apple Podcasts: ⁠The Bitchionary⁠

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ for general inquiries.

Email Becca at ⁠[email protected]⁠ or Lily at ⁠[email protected]⁠. 

Sources

https://loadedliteraturepodcast.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/half-hanged-mary-by-margaret-atwood/

https://valleyadvocate.com/2024/10/24/scary-and-true-half-hanged-mary-and-the-real-women-behind-the-areas-most-compelling-ghost-stories/

https://massreview.org/node/7575/

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/mary-webster-witch-hadley-survives-hanging/

https://woodlawnschool.pbworks.com/f/The+Crucible+-+Half+Hanged+Mary+Poem+PDF.pdf