Power Of The Purse: How Department Stores Paved The Financial Way For Women

Close your eyes for a second and step back to the 1940s. Specifically, New York City in the 1940s. You’re walking down a crowded street, pushing your little one in the stroller, purse over your shoulder, and sporting a pair of new, wide-legged pants, à la Katharine Hepburn. You have a certain pep in your step. Why? You’re headed to your favorite department store, Lord & Taylor, for a little shopping and much, much more. You drop your baby off at the nursery, have lunch with your three closest friends, pick up a steak for dinner, and get your hair done. You’re surrounded by hundreds of other powerful women, from the makeup counter to the housewares department.  Pipedream? Or reality? 

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Decades ago, department stores were not only places where women shopped but also where women had power — power they did not have elsewhere at the time. In her new book: “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion,” Julie Satow takes a deep dive into the department stores of yesteryear and the powerful women who were behind their success, including three who rose to the top of their respective department stores and paved the way for other working women. 

SHOPPING, SISTERHOOD AND SALARIES

“Women really weren’t even supposed to be walking on the sidewalks without a male chaperone and suddenly these stores provided an opportunity for women to congregate in public, to go shopping, to do this new pastime of window shopping, and they had the money,” Satow says. 

Where’d they get the money? Many of them earned it by working in, yup, department stores. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, by 1920, there were 8 million women working, which represented 20% of the total workforce. Most women working in sales at department stores were working class. For them, the job was more than a nine-to-five. It was an opportunity to get ahead in a big way. 

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“The store owners really did put an emphasis on training them,” Satow says. “Women could take classes in accounting to learn how to do the financial aspect of their jobs. They [provided] the support to raise the women up and help them serve their clients better.”  Satow tells the story of a woman who started out as a “dust girl” in a San Francisco department store. “By her twenties, she was supporting her whole family,” says Satow. “She’d moved them out of the Mission District into a very fancy house…she was going to Paris as a buyer. It was an amazing opportunity for women.”

RETAIL REVOLUTIONARIES PAVE THE WAY

For many of these women, their position at the department store was their first job outside the home. That was true for Hortense Odlum, the first woman president of (the late, great) Bonwit Teller Department Store in New York City, which her husband owned. At the height of the Great Depression, he was prepping to close its doors. Hortense turned the store’s fortune’s around by using what she knew about women and shopping to make a series of small tweaks.  She turned the complaint department into the customer service department and moved the hat department near the entrance of the store (because these were the days when everyone wore hats, see: Maisel, Midge.)  

“Given her experience as a young mom and a shopper herself, she saw a number of things that things that she felt they could fix,” explains Satow. “So she started to help out and before long, she became president of the store…the first woman to ever become president of a major Fifth Avenue department store.” 

Her shopper’s intuition and attention to detail resulted in big wins for Bonwit Teller. At the top of her career, Oldum was a powerful woman, overseeing a business that in today’s dollars would be valued at $200 million, as well as 1,500 employees. 

But, as many women know far too well, it can be challenging to balance a burgeoning career and one’s personal life. Eventually, that’s what caused Oldum to step down from her position. “Think about how hard it is in today’s world still to balance that stuff and do everything right,” shares Satow. “Back then there was far less support…so I think it was just that much harder.”

TODAY’S WORKING WOMAN: PART OF A “HISTORIC CONTINUUM”

Satow penned her book while she was home during the pandemic with her two young children. As she shares, at the time, she was struggling with her own challenges related to work-life balance. Satow found encouragement though in the stories of the working women she was researching. “I didn’t realize the historic continuum that we’re part of,” she says. “And to me, that was so inspiring and emboldening.” 

Inspiring, emboldening, and also, not all that different. While women have come a long way, thanks in part to the efforts of those Satow spotlights in her book, many of the struggles they faced are still part of our lives today, and serve as a reminder of how far we still have to go. 

“There was an article, for instance, from 1932 from Good Housekeeping. And it was titled “Marriage or Career,” says Satow. “It was an interview with all these successful women, including Dorothy Shaver, about whether they think they could have a career if they were also married…It felt so modern and, and relevant to today in so many ways.”

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