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.
Themes
The Changing Roles of Women in 20th-Century America
The role of women in the national consciousness changed drastically several times throughout the 20th century as the American economy fluctuated. Satow’s history of the fashion industry suggests the fluctuation of women’s rights as a similar a kind of sociocultural pendulum in which periods of growth for women’s rights were followed by backlashes throughout the 20th century.
In the early 1920s, women achieved significant progress in the fight to expand their freedom, access, and influence in society. When Dorothy Shaver came to New York City in 1918, she took her place as one of “a new female archetype, the flapper [who] was emerging in the national consciousness” (35). This new woman was “glamorous, sexually uninhibited, and financially independent” and “represented previously unimaginable freedoms for young women” (35). The emphasis on sexual and financial freedom in this passage highlights how men had previously held financial control, reifying the patriarchal structures that prescribed women’s sexual roles throughout history. Satow’s emphasis on glamor reflects her argument that “changing national attitudes towards female workers were reflected in miniature in the department stores” throughout the 20th century (53). As post-World War I prosperity brought on the golden age of department stores, the retail industry became a space where single young women like Dorothy Shaver were able to build independent lives.
Satow roots the backlashes to this progress in the social and financial impact of the Great Depression. Historians estimate that nearly 25% of working adults were unemployed at the height of the depression in 1929, and Satow suggests that “with so many men unemployed, backlash against female job seekers was inevitable” (71). Popular press sources depicted working women “as impertinent interlopers who stole jobs from more deserving men” (72). The description of female workers as “impertinent” suggests that the backlash was not caused exclusively by financial troubles, but also by the threat working women posed to archetypical, white masculinity—resentments institutionalized by the Economy Act of 1932, which “dictated that federal agencies that were downsizing first fire wives if they were married to men who also held government jobs,” resulting in the firing of 1600 female employees within a year (74). Private companies followed suit, and “regularly fired married women employees” first (179). Although Satow attributes the backlash against women workers to “sexism and a lack of government support,” these passages suggest that the government—overwhelmingly run by white men—actively led the backlash (71).
As prosperity returned in the 1940s, women began to enter the workplace again. Satow points to the advent of Glamour magazine, which used the tagline “For the girl with a job” as evidence of the popular celebration of the new working women (143). Glamour was aimed at readers who were “young, educated […] and enthusiastically entering the workforce,” like Geraldine Stutz, who joined Glamour in 1947. Although “the disparagement of women’s work outside the home was temporarily paused during the war years,” allowing women like Geraldine Stutz to build dynamic careers, the backlash returned in the post-war years, “as exemplified by the 1950s ethos that glorified women’s role as a homemaker” (266). Satow’s analysis positions the re-emergence of the homemaker ideal as a direct response to the working women of the late 1930s and early 40s.
The Mutual Influence of Fashion and Technology
Although the focus of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue remains the influence of female leaders on department stores, Satow also highlights the importance of emerging technology that made possible many of the innovations introduced by the book’s central figures. As the fashion industry took advantage of technological advances in the post-war era, department stores built on this progress, developing new technologies independently to meet customer needs.
All aspects of the industry were impacted by technological advances, starting with funding and clothing manufacturing. Floyd Odlum built his financial empire by buying up a series of failing entities from “undervalued Hollywood studios to bankrupt national airlines to risky uranium mines” to the department store Bonwit Teller (76). The references in this passage to air travel and uranium mining—at that time the height of technology—highlight the connection between cutting edge technology and high fashion as fields with the potential to be valuable commercial enterprises. Odlum’s technological investments allowed him to buy Bonwit Teller, which became an influential fashion house under the leadership of his wife Hortense Odlum. Such influence also ran in the opposite direction, as American clothing manufacturers developed new technologies to increase production. As a result of these technological advances, New York City’s Garment District “produced 100 million wardrobe pieces a year, or 72 percent of all of America’s domestically manufactured clothing” in the mid 20th century (116). During the same years, “the era’s fastest passenger ship ‘shuttled so many American buyers back and forth between Paris and New York that she was famously known as the Seventh Avenue Express” (124). These passages reflect the influence of American fashion on technology, as fashion houses adapted wartime technologies in order to meet the manufacturing needs of America’s new middle class.
The experience of shopping in a department store was also influenced by technological advances. When Bonwit Teller opened its flagship store, customers came to shop but also “to ride on one of thirty-three hydraulic elevators or four escalators, and wonder at the pneumatic tube system that shot cash and sales slips along a web of cylinders affixed to the ceiling” (15-16). Escalators were developed specifically for department stores, as they “could transport as many shoppers in a single hour as forty elevators” (53). These passages suggest that customers were drawn to Bonwit Teller specifically for their use of modern technology, like escalators and pneumatic tubes, which were both convenient and exciting. At Henri Bendel, technological advances were developed to improve the employee experience, with “workrooms that featured light fixtures specifically designed to be bright without casting a shadow and a fur vault lined on all four walls with cooling pipes that kept the air […] the ideal chill for preservation” (154). Satow’s history shows that fashion and technology industries were mutually influential throughout the 20th century.
The Benefits of Women in Leadership
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue narrates the lives of three women who ran department stores in a time when virtually all leadership positions were occupied by men. Satow argues that “department stores were uniquely female universes, where women commanded power in ways that were often unattainable elsewhere,” and that the golden age of department stores in the mid-20th century can be attributed to women in leadership (13). The history she presents demonstrates concrete benefits to having women in leadership positions.
Satow’s protagonists assert a contrast between the business world and the world of women, but also invert contemporaneous expectations by aligning innovative ideas and common sense with feminine inexperience, rather than male experience. When Hortense Odlum took the presidency of Bonwit Teller in 1934, “a female president of a business was an exotic concept” (94-95). Hortense leaned into her lack of experience, arguing that she “brought to [her] job a fresh point of view and what [she] liked to believe was plain common sense, both of which seemed to [her] to be sorely needed in the business world” (97). Bonwit Teller’s advertising at the time echoed this idea: “Let’s be unprofessional and do things that were never done before…let’s be feminine and follow our hunches” (97). These advertisements took advantage of the uniqueness of Hortense’s position to argue that she offered a unique perspective that Bonwit Teller’s competitors could not match.
Geraldine Stutz’s career at Henri Bendel further underscores the benefits of women in leadership positions, highlighting her lived experience and interpersonal skills. Geraldine’s close personal relationships with New York’s most stylish and powerful women gave Henri Bendel an advantage not enjoyed by department stores run by men. Chapter 14 includes a photo of Geraldine with “Nancy White, former editor of Harper’s Bazaar; Eugenia Sheppard, the fashion columnist for the New York Herald Tribune; and Sally Kirkland, the retired fashion editor at Life” (280-81). Satow uses the photograph as evidence of Geraldine’s relationships with fashion writers and editors for popular and elite publications, who provided incredible publicity for the store. Satow’s narrative emphasizes the fact that Geraldine’s personal relationships with these women likely could never have existed in the same way for a male executive.
