The whisky ad and the Women’s March: When the struggle becomes a marketing campaign

A Glenlivet whisky advert uses the 1956 Women’s March to sell alcohol, pairing images of historic women with Dineo Moeketsi Langa reflecting and raising a toast. For a historian and whisky lover, the campaign is not a tasteful tribute. It is a troubling reduction of painful history to a sales pitch.

The advert presents the toast as an act of honouring women of the past. But that framing, the writer argues, strips away the significance of their struggles. South Africa’s history includes the beerhalls and their damage to black communities, the “skokiaan queens” who brewed and sold alcohol to feed their families while risking arrest, and the dop system on wine farms, whose consequences continue across generations.

The backlash suggests that many South Africans understand the weight of that history. It also points to the continuing importance of historical awareness, critical thinking and public debate, despite the devaluation of the humanities in some quarters. History, the writer insists, cannot simply become a decorative reference used to sell a product.

The advert forms part of a wider concern about depoliticising women’s history. The writer recalls a recent seminar on the continuing struggles of black women in 1957, where an audience member asked what it means to turn Women’s Day and Women’s Month into discounts, spa days, self-care, empowerment and pampering.

Yet the writer also asks whether the historic women themselves should be imagined as having no moments of relief. Could they have enjoyed a drink on a special occasion, or gathered socially, rather than living lives defined only by struggle? That possibility does not resolve the problem with the advert. The larger-than-life images and the use of photography to summon the past instead raise a harder question: how would those women have responded to being used to sell whisky?