A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown

Emily Remus

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A Shoppers’ Paradise

How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown

Emily Remus

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2019

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About this book

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district.

After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men.

A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

Reviews

As suburban shopping malls and more recently e-commerce eclipse commercial downtowns, the department stores and theaters that once anchored them are disappearing. Remus’s wonderful book has much to teach us about the past, present, and future of downtown. Not only did rising consumption reshape the built environment of central cities in the late nineteenth century, but so too did battles over who belonged—or did not—in this new public space. As the metropolitan landscape shifts again today, Remus’s fascinating insights into the past remind us that much more is at stake than simply where we shop.
-- Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

A Shoppers’ Paradise creatively reframes our understanding of consumer culture. Through a series of brilliantly executed case studies of women in commercial public spaces in Chicago, Emily Remus highlights the interaction of pleasure, power, and danger. Drawing on forgotten conflicts over hats, hoop skirts, drinking, and other subjects, Remus highlights the political nature of debates about the right to consume. With special attention to legal cases, this book brings to life a rich and original archive. There is no book on consumer culture quite like this delightful and erudite study.
-- Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America

A Shoppers’ Paradise is an original and convincing contribution to our understanding of gender and public space in American cities. Remus argues that elite and middle-class women’s use of the public downtown landscape of theaters, cafes, shops, and the street as sites of consumption and pleasure over time transformed common awareness about the purpose of the downtown and women’s rights to the city as citizens.
-- Jessica Ellen Sewell, author of Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915

Helps to demonstrate how women participated in the transformation of Chicago’s culture simply by establishing their presence in public spaces.
-- Linda Levitt PopMatters

An engrossing and interdisciplinary study…Remus makes a compelling argument about affluent women’s impact on public space and vividly describes how they were central to the development of a thriving culture of consumption. With perceptive attention to the physical world(s) of moneyed women, the book adds to the literature not only on Chicago and urban history, but gender, the built environment, and material culture.
-- Kathleen Daly New England Journal of History

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Frontmatter
i

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Contents
v

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Introduction
1
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1. Moneyed Women and the Downtown
12
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2. The Hoopskirt War of 1893
35
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3. Consumer Rights and the Theater Hat Problem
71
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4. Tippling Ladies and Public Pleasure
116
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5. Mashers, Prostitutes, and Shopping Ladies
147
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6. The Traffic of Women
191
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Conclusion
227
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Notes
233
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Acknowledgments
289
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Index
293

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

April 1, 2019

eBook ISBN:

9780674240292

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674240292

eBook ISBN: 9780674240292

A Shoppers’ Paradise

Overview

About this book

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Moneyed Women and the Downtown

2. The Hoopskirt War of 1893

3. Consumer Rights and the Theater Hat Problem

4. Tippling Ladies and Public Pleasure

5. Mashers, Prostitutes, and Shopping Ladies

6. The Traffic of Women

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Bibliographic data