WorkingMama Magazine Launches at Exclusive Books V&A Waterfront

WorkingMama Magazine launched in-store at Exclusive Books V&A Waterfront, Cape Town's premier bookstore, drawing more than 30 attendees, most of them women, including many of the female founders featured inside its pages.

On Friday, 28 August, WorkingMama Magazine put women's stories onto a shelf inside Exclusive Books V&A Waterfront, where they cannot be scrolled past the way a social post can. Many of the founders whose businesses and careers fill the magazine's current pages were in the room, there because they wanted to see the launch, not because anyone had asked them to promote it.

Founder, editor and publisher Elize Fisher built the magazine on a simple bet: that a printed title still does something no timeline can, no matter how crowded the market gets.

"Literally, I chose a magazine because I've always loved reading, writing and storytelling. Figuratively, a magazine gives stories a place of permanence. Social media disappears down a feed, but a magazine says, 'This story matters. It deserves to be seen, remembered and recognised.'"
— Elize Fisher, Founder, Editor and Publisher, WorkingMama Magazine

That is the distinction Fisher is describing: a story that disappears against a story that stays. It is why the room mattered more than the date on a calendar, and why the women filling it were more than an audience for a brand announcement. They were the subjects the magazine was built to keep track of.

WorkingMama Magazine has spent three years covering the working women South Africa's mainstream media cycle moves past too quickly: founders building businesses around school pick-ups, executives negotiating maternity leave clauses that were never written with them in mind, and mothers scaling careers without a template to follow. A quarterly title, it has built its readership specifically around business, entrepreneurship, career and motherhood, refusing to treat any one of those as a lifestyle add-on to the others.

Fisher is direct about why that difference matters to her personally. The point, she says, was never simply to publish stories. It was to give women's stories "a place where they could be seen, valued and remembered."

For the founders attending for the first time, that line reads less like marketing and more like a mission statement, the kind a room full of working women spent a Friday evening confirming in person, watching their own stories go into print.

About WorkingMama Magazine

Founded by Elize Fisher and published quarterly, WorkingMama Magazine profiles South Africa's professional working women building businesses, careers and family life at the same time. Now in its third year, the magazine is available exclusively in-store at Exclusive Books V&A Waterfront and online at www.workingmamaza.com. Find WorkingMama Magazine on Instagram at @workingmama_za.