In A Shoppers’ Paradise, Emily Remus argues that the conversion of downtown business districts into largely feminine sites of consumption―a panoply of grand hotels, department stores, restaurants and tea rooms, theaters, luxury shops, even soda fountains―where moneyed women came and went daily as codenizens of city centers, “had to be created”; that women's uncontested presence at these consumer palaces established primarily for them cannot be taken as “what goes without saying”; and that consequently an urban history of the rise of consumer capitalism must acknowledge “the crucial role of gender in this ‘revolutionary process’” (pp. 2, 7, 8). Remus's choice of concentration is turn-of-the-century Chicago. Through an episodic accounting of repeated challenges to women's conquest of downtown space, and how in nearly all cases these were rebuffed, Remus's intent is to show “how moneyed women helped establish a city center that accommodated, even invited, their presence” (p. 9).
Some of these brouhahas—one over a threat to downtown mobility from a return to hoopskirt fashions (it did not happen), another over ladies’ hats in theaters—are fairly small historical beer and send this book off to a slow start. Later chapters—particularly one on the plague of mashers who preyed on the influx of unaccompanied women to the Loop, another on city congestion from competing downtown business functions (the one the male domain of manufacturing and finance, the other the female realm of consumption)―allow Remus to shine at what she does best: framing this history of bourgeois consumption as a larger story about the emergence of big-city Chicago with all its rawness and its mighty shoulders rounded and stooped under the weight of its own big-business success. In these chapters Remus is most successful in alloying “conflict over gender and space” with the making of modern Chicago (p. 3).
A number of questions arise. One is simply: Why the persistent insularity of American history in a book published in 2019? Much of the consumer transformation that Remus describes is, by now, well-trod territory. Erika Rappaport's Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (2000) described a similar development for Europe's largest city, but the only reference to her work is an also-ran citation in one footnote in the introduction. Readers would never know that there is a sizeable history on department stores, and cultural reactions to them, for France, Germany, and Britain. Most glaring is the absence of any reference to Émile Zola, even though the author's title will recall, to all in the know, the English translation of his Au bonheur des dames (translated as The Ladies’ Paradise [1883]). This is not simply a matter of acknowledgment. If A Shoppers’ Paradise is to be seen as a contribution to the history of capitalism, then readers need to know how Remus's very well-informed understanding of downtown Chicago offers a variation on a wider Western phenomenon or whether American capitalism and its gendered outcomes differed from those of western Europe or from how the history of consumer capitalism has been written for the other side of the Atlantic.
One is also provoked to ask whether the male critics who initiate the challenge in practically every chapter really had to be overcome, or whether Remus's real contribution is to describe an unstoppable process well underway. Too often her contestations come to abrupt, all but fizzled-out endings. Women decide not to buy hoopskirts. Rants about unescorted women drinking flavored liqueurs in public go nowhere because that train had already left the station: “the lady tippler had staked a place in urban life―and would not retreat” (p. 144). Fights over public space for traffic priorities dissipate with the publication of Daniel H. Burnham's Plan for Chicago (1909). Even when the resolution terminates in a bang rather than a whimper―in, for instance, the debate over ladies’ hats in theaters―and women lose, the total surrender implies a battle without much of a cause. Meanwhile, the reader is forced to wonder what husbands seated in theaters next to wives bearing gorgeous but massive hats on their heads, but behind someone else's wife or daughter in an equally outsized construction, thought of it all. There is a private family history here that one aches to enter.
There is, too, the question of which gender played the critical role in “this ‘revolutionary process’” (p. 8). Much of Remus's history is about how profit-seeking men created public space for women and thereby redefined the gendered use of downtown Chicago. Moreover, throughout the account, Remus describes not only men creating new venues for women but, unsurprisingly, these same men allying with women to defend their right to consume downtown. When the masher menace crossed the line into a horrifying rape-murder, it was the rallying of men fearing bad business press (but almost certainly, for many, rallying to an equally personal imperative) that produced the necessary funding to increase police presence on the city's streets. When shopping women were accused of congesting city streets and clogging the wheels of progress, it was businessmen who squared off on both sides and ultimately it was the men in “the powerful Commercial Club of Chicago” who commissioned Burnham's compromise solution (p. 223). Remus rightfully identifies the actions of moneyed women in establishing an inviting city center, but the real powers in her story are moneyed men.
Remus has not written to business historians as her primary audience, but this is nonetheless a welcome addition to the history of business. To tell her story well she must digress into the fashion history of hoopskirts and the millinery trade or the existence of a chaperone business, yet the greater value of the book is as an urban history of competing business elites. A Shoppers’ Paradise is at its most interesting when it pits merchants against industrialists and wholesalers and shows how modern Chicago emerged from that mix.
