51 pages • 1 hour read
Julie SatowWhen Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
In the first half of the 20th century, department stores represented a rare space where women possessed agency and influence. With the exception of the executive class, department stores were managed, staffed, and patronized almost exclusively by women. America’s first department store was New York City’s Marble Palace, opened in 1846 by A.T. Steward. Stores like the Palace and nearby Macy’s featured shopping spaces for elite and working-class women, and sold clothing, home goods, animals, and beauty services. Women also worked in these institutions as clerks, accountants, buyers, and copywriters.
Although female executives were rare, Satow’s book centers on three notable women who successfully ran New York City department stores in the 20th century. Hortense Odlum revitalized Bonwit Teller after her husband bought the failing department store during the Great Depression. Dorothy Shaver’s single-minded ambition drove her to rise through the ranks at Lord & Taylor to become the highest-paid female executive in American history. Geraldine Stutz became the first female owner of a major New York department store in 1980, but struggled to keep up with the advent of mall culture. Echoes of the structural challenges faced by these women continue into the modern age of American fashion and business.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Hortense Goes Shopping”
Part 1 begins with a quote from Hortense Odlum claiming she never wanted to be a businesswoman. In 1916, Hortense Odlum and her husband Floyd, a junior clerk at a prestigious law firm, had been invited to spend Thanksgiving with one of Floyd’s colleagues. Hortense knew that none of her thrifty homemade dresses were appropriate to wear. Stressed and limited to a small budget, Hortense felt overwhelmed by the chaotic bargain bins in the basement of her nearest department store. When the workers ignored her, she bought the first dress she found in her budget and left, humiliated. The experience remained with her for years, and influenced her decision making as an executive.
Hortense was born and raised in St. George, Utah. Her grandparents were early converts to Mormonism who followed Joseph Smith into the desert. Hortense was raised on her grandparents’ pioneer stories, and inherited their fearless ambition. She left home for Salt Lake City at the age of 17. In 1915, at 25, she met and quickly married Floyd Odlum, an ambitious lawyer. Three weeks after the birth of their first son, Floyd accepted a job in Manhattan and the couple moved, excited by their new prospects on the East coast.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Dorothy Arrives ‘Home’”
In the winter of 1918, 25-year-old Dorothy Shaver & her 23-year-old artist sister Elsie arrived in New York City on a weekend trip from Chicago and quickly decided to stay for good. It was an exciting time to be a young woman: the passage of the 19th amendment the following summer granted 26 million American women the right to vote, while progressive policies allowed women like Dorothy to attend college and establish independent lives. Inspired by the success of Kewpie dolls, Dorothy encouraged Elsie to design dolls that she would market and sell.
Elsie drew inspiration for the dolls from her memories of their small-town childhood in Mena, Arkansas. The sisters’ grandfather, “Fightin’ Bob” Shaver was a Confederate soldier who lived with the family in his old age. Having been raised in Mena, a town with a horrific record of racial violence, the Shaver sisters were likely exposed to hateful rhetoric as children. In later years, Dorothy would use her influence to advocate for racial equality.
Meanwhile, Elsie used the stories her grandfather told her as a child to design a small collection of dolls. Dorothy showed a doll prototype to a visiting cousin, who happened to be the President of Lord & Taylor. Dorothy negotiated a small sale of the dolls at the store, which was wildly successfully. Dorothy & Elsie declined offers to merchandise the dolls, electing to start their own business instead.
Part 1, Interlude 1 Summary: “Maggie Walker’s New Venture”
In a brief interlude from the primary narrative, Satow focuses on Maggie Lena Walker, a pioneering Black entrepreneur who founded a department store aimed at Black shoppers in Richmond, Virginia. As Richmond’s white citizens sought to disenfranchise Black voters and segregate public spaces, The St. Luke Emporium emerged in 1905 as a safe, welcoming, and independent space for Richmond’s Black community. The Emporium was not Maggie’s first business venture: she founded a Black newspaper and an insurance company for women, and was the first Black female president of a bank.
Despite a brief flurry of excitement when the Emporium opened, Richmond’s Black community ultimately continued to shop at white-owned stores, and the Emporium was not as successful as Maggie had hoped. The business also faced outright harassment from Richmond’s white business community, who organized a boycott of any wholesalers that did business with Maggie and the Emporium. The Emporium remained open for seven years, but was forced to close in 1912 after sales fell nearly 60 percent.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Dorothy Discovers Art Deco”
After several years of successful business, Elsie Shaver grew tired of making dolls and insisted that the Little Shavers store be closed. Dorothy reluctantly accepted a job offer from her cousin, the president of Lord & Taylor, who was impressed by her business skills. She began as a supervisor in the comparison-shopping department, which used secret shoppers to spy on both rival department stores and Lord & Taylor employees. The pressure of these secret shoppers was one of many facing women working in department stores. Unused to wielding commercial power, their female customers could often be unreasonable or rude, and fierce competition between stores meant technology and merchandise frequently changed. In addition, saleswomen faced harassment and condescension from their male supervisors and the occasional male shopper.
Dorothy quickly realized that the company should stop spying on competitors and focus instead on developing unique programs, such as personal shopping. She was quickly promoted to director of fashions and interior decorations, and at the age of 34 she became one of only two women to sit on the board of directors. Her greatest success was a 1928 exhibition of French art deco furnishings, which brought 300,000 visitors to the store. The exhibit cemented Dorothy’s role as a taste-maker in New York.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 3 Analysis
The prologue to When Women Ran Fifth Avenue highlights the book’s thematic interest in The Changing Roles of Women in 20th-Century America. Satow identifies American department stores as the site of significant change for women in the first half of the 20th century. She describes department stores as “uniquely female universes where women commanded power in ways that were often unattainable elsewhere” (13). In this passage, she employs evocative language to describe department stores as independent “universes,” highlighting both the novel size of these stores and their relative isolation from the world of men. In the same way, the image of women in department stores “commanding” a power “unattainable” to them in the outside world frames department stores as revolutionary spaces in which women accessed control, influence and material professional success. This early description of department stores highlights the ways in which women’s roles were shifting in early 20th-century America. Although women still struggled for civic and social equality, department stores allowed some women to participate more fully in business and act independently. Satow argues that department stores offered a productive space for women to explore these new roles.
In the book’s opening chapters, Satow positions Hortense Odlum and Dorothy Shaver as polar opposites. Hortense wrote in her autobiography that she loved housework, saying: “it gave me tremendous satisfaction to know that as my husband was doing his job well, I was helping him by doing mine” (25). In contrast, Satow depicts Dorothy as a “career-minded” woman who “eschewed romance to singularly pursue her ambition” (20). While Dorothy was celebrated as “America’s No. 1 Career Woman,” Hortense famously claimed that “the only career [she] ever wanted was in the home” (22). Hortense eventually “came to rue her time at Bonwit Teller, blaming it for her personal hardships and eventually forsaking her legacy” (19), while Dorothy “leveraged her platform to influence politics and current affairs,” using her career with Lord & Taylor as a starting point for her public life (20). The depiction of Hortense and Dorothy in the book’s opening chapters as polar opposites directly reflects the evolving roles of women in early 20th-century America. While Hortense endorsed traditional, prescribed notions of gender that expected women to support their husbands as housewives and mothers, Dorothy rejected those roles, embracing her own professional ambition.
Satow also contrasts the figure of Dorothy Shaver with that of Maggie Lena Walker to highlight the ways that overt racism and implicit bias created disparities of resources and privilege that impacted the success of BIPOC women in this era. For Dorothy, the history of racial violence in her hometown represented a shameful secret, whereas for Maggie, racial violence posed a very real and active threat to her business and personal safety. Maggie’s story highlights the privilege granted to white women like Dorothy Shaver and Hortense Odlum. Dorothy grew up in Mena, Arkansas, a town with “a deplorable race record,” and Satow argues that there was “little doubt that Dorothy was exposed to hateful rhetoric while growing up” (38). The use of the words “record” and “exposed” in this passage suggests that racism represented a tangential issue on the edges of Dorothy’s life. Although she later “became a vocal advocate for racial equality,” Dorothy’s identity as a white woman meant that the constant background of racial violence in the American South was an abstract problem to be overcome, and not a present threat in her life (39). For Maggie, racism was an active force: “outright harassment from Richmond’s white residents” forced St. Luke’s Emporium to close (47). Satow emphasizes the ways in which Dorothy’s whiteness allowed her to pursue and achieve commercial success in ways not available to Maggie.
