1 gen 1910 anni - Image in textbook of department store

Descrizione:

America’s public spaces, from election polls to saloons and circus shows, had long been boisterous and male-centered. A woman who ventured there without a male chaperone risked damaging her reputation (or worse). But the rise of new businesses encouraged change. To cater to a willing public, purveyors of consumer culture invited women and families, especially those of the middle class, to linger in department stores and enjoy new amusements.

No one promoted commercial domesticity more successfully than showman P. T. Barnum, who used the country’s expanding rail network to develop his famous traveling circus. Barnum condemned earlier circus managers who had opened their tents to “the rowdy element.” Proclaiming children as his key audience, he created family entertainment for diverse audiences (though in the South, black audiences sat in segregated seats or attended separate shows). He promised middle-class parents that his circus would teach children courage and promote the benefits of exercise. To encourage women’s attendance, Barnum emphasized the respectability and refinement of his female performers.

Department stores also lured middle-class women by offering tearooms, children’s play areas, umbrellas, and clerks to wrap and carry every purchase. Store credit plans enabled well-to-do women to shop without handling money in public. Such tactics succeeded so well that New York’s department store district became known as Ladies’ Mile. Boston department store magnate William Filene called the department store an “Adamless Eden.”

These Edens were reserved for elite and middle classes. Though bargain basements and neighborhood stores served working-class families, big department stores used vagrancy laws and police to discourage the “wrong kind” from entering. Workingclass women gained access primarily as clerks, cashiers, and cash girls, who as young as age twelve began work as internal store messengers, carrying orders and change for $1.50 a week. The department store was no Eden for these women, who worked long hours on their feet, often dealing with difficult customers. Nevertheless, some clerks made enthusiastic use of employee discounts and battled employers for the right to wear their fashionable purchases while they worked in the store.

A black-and-white photograph shows female customers browsing through the merchandise at Elliott-Taylor-Woolfenden Department Store in Detroit.
Department Store, Detroit, Michigan, c. 1910

Department stores advertised “everything under one roof”: middle-class urban women could shop for clothes, furniture, food, home goods, and other items all in one location. Successful department stores offered lounges, restaurants, postal services, and holiday concerts and events. This shopper enjoys personalized service from several clerks. A cradle stands by for any mother whose youngster needs a nap.


The foreground shows a female customer looking through the items displayed by a saleswoman standing at the counter. There is a doll on the counter in front of her while two cane cradles rest on top of the shelves behind the saleswoman. Several other saleswomen await customers. The rest of the photograph shows an extensive store with many shelves and counters.

Finding prosperous Americans eager for excursions, railroad companies, like department stores, made things comfortable for middle-class women and children. Boston’s South Station boasted of its modern amenities, including “everything that the traveler needs down to cradles in which the baby may be soothed.” Rail cars manufactured by the famous Pullman Company of Chicago set a national standard for taste and elegance. Part of their appeal was the chance for people of modest means to emulate the rich. One experienced train conductor observed that the wives of grocers, not millionaires, were the ones most likely to “sweep … into a parlor car as if the very carpet ought to feel highly honored by their tread.”

SKILLS & PROCESSES
MAKING CONNECTIONS

How did new consumer practices arising from industrialization reshape Americans’ gender, class, and race relationships?

First-class “ladies’ cars” soon became sites of struggle for racial equality.

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