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JESSICA SEWELL: So my name is Jessica Sewell. I'm an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at UVA. And I'm a feminist historian of the built environment

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at all scales-- so cities, landscapes, buildings, objects, all of those things. I'm also the author of a book called Gendering the Everyday

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City that's about San Francisco at the turn of the century. So retail history is important to the history of gender. It's also important to the history of cities. So an important a really big piece

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of retail history that's important to gender is that it transforms the downtown of the city into a place where women have legitimacy to be. When you have department stores, when

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you have a shopping district, all of a sudden, there's this place where women are out in public. And this actually becomes a really important place for women when they're fighting for their rights,

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both for white women during the suffrage movement, but also for Black women when they're fighting for their right to be seen as full parts of the population.

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And the other thing about retail is that department stores, especially, teach people how to be middle-class consumers. You go into the department store, and it shows you, here is what your living room is like.

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Here is the kind of dishes you should have. Here's the way you should be living your life. Here's the way you should be dressing. And all of that's really tied up with gender, especially houses.

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It's about certain kinds of performances of gender. And the stores teach people, often the newly middle-class people, how to do this. So we can't really think about retail

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without thinking about gender because the act of shopping is something-- and the act of consuming, as well, is something that has been gendered, that gender has shifted a bit.

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But in the time period that we're looking at, shopping and consuming are things that are gendered female. So the question of who the shopper is,

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how the shopper is being engaged is something that's really gendered. And then the question of, who's working there? Who's doing that selling?

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What's the relationship between the person who's doing the selling and the person who's doing the shopping? Is the person who's doing the selling telling the person who's doing the shopping,

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here's what you will buy? Or is the person who is doing the selling saying, what would you like, madam? I'll give you exactly what you want.

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And those are two very different and very different gendered kinds of relationships between people. So we can't really think about retail without thinking about, who are the people who are selling?

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Who are the people who are being sold to? And how are ideas of gender and gendered relations between people part of that act of selling? So when department stores originally

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began, most of the workers-- or many of the workers on the floor doing the immediate selling, immediate interacting with shoppers were women, mostly young women.

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And very often, they were women who'd come in from the countryside, when you've got a new industrial ways of doing farming, and so you've got a lot of extra people, and they're coming in.

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And at the beginning, in order to make sure that these women were taken care of-- because they're very young-- and that they're morally correct,

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they often lived in dorms that were run by the department stores. So they would have a dorm mother, and they're eating their meals in the cafeteria.

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Basically, everything is being pretty much controlled by the department store. That shifts over time, in terms of-- they stop having dorms quite as much,

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but they're really interested-- they want politeness. They want whiteness. They want native English speaker. They want all of these kind of things in that working

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population. These young women are also working really long hours. It's not until the late 1930s with union activism that they finally get a 40-hour workweek.

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Before that, it is not uncommon for them to be working from 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning till 8:00 or 9:00 at night many days, and often six or even seven days a week.

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So it's really long hours standing on your feet. So it's young women who are doing that immediate touch with a-- but it's almost entirely men who are doing the management

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positions. They're the ones who are managing the floor, who are watching what those young women are doing. Over time, women get into somewhat more positions

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of authority, especially as buyers because they can be seen as knowing what women will want. So they can be the ones who are going out there and deciding, OK, this is what we should be--

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so almost half of buyers by the late 1920s are women. And women are moving into slightly higher positions. Women are also in a lot of those back-office positions-- filing, answering phones, packaging, mailing,

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all of that kind of stuff. But all the way into the present, more of the people who are on the floor are women, more of the people who are management are men.

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The women are always getting paid less. There's also important-- which kind of women is a thing that matters. So as I mentioned, it's mostly white, English-speaking women

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who are being hired for that front-of-store stuff. But already in the 19th century, Black women, immigrant women are also being hired, but they're being hired to do the less-visible stuff.

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So they're working in the mailroom. They're working packaging. They're working doing other kinds of jobs. And it's not until--

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in the US, it's not until the 1960s, when the federal government begins to do some enforcement of labour laws, that you get a few more women of colour. But it remains something that is prejudiced--

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that it's about whiteness. It's about youngness. It's about prettiness. And it's also about making these women who are often from--

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the poor women, poorer women, less-educated women-- making them look a little more middle class. So in the French stores, they would put them in black silk dresses.

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So they're simple, but they're really nice fabric. And they're being taught manners and how to please the customers. And this is a really important piece of what's going on.

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And this could make people crazy. So there's a study that's done in 1910 by a sociologist named Annie MacLean, and she's studying the working conditions of women across the US.

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And one of the things she found about women in department stores is one of the things that made them most crazy about their work was the women who came in and asked them lots of questions

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and wanted to look at everything and didn't buy anything. Those were the women who really made them crazy because they weren't making any commissions on these women. And these women would ask them questions that were sometimes

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not things they wanted to answer, like about how much they were making and stuff like that. But the customer was always right, so they always had to defer to these women.

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So there's something-- that kind of constant subservience to the role was something that women actually found really grinding, part of what made that work more difficult. So as I mentioned, one of the ways

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that the shape of the workforce changes is that women manage to move into somewhat more positions of more power. Another really important thing that changes

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is that, by the 1920s and increasingly in the post-War era, you have the growth of chain stores. So first, you have department stores. Department stores are, like, this amazing space,

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where everybody is treated like a queen. And they've got this kind of high-class thing. But then you get the chain stores, like Woolworth's, and those are places where everybody can

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get things, and they're more-- but they're less high-touch. They're less "customer is always right." They're much more self-serve.

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And so that becomes a big piece of the retail environment. And those places-- you don't have to look quite as classy to be working in those places. You don't have to be as good at persuading people to buy things

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or as knowledgeable about style the kind of ways that you have to be in the department stores. And those stores also have a somewhat wider range of people who are working in them.

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So they can have-- especially depending on what population they're serving, the women who are working in those can change. Another thing that's important is the other options

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open up for women, especially. If we're looking at the beginning of department stores, 1860s height, those kind of-- every city has a department store by, like, 1890, 1900.

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That period, there's not that many options for women. My grandma said she had to be a nurse or a teacher, and she didn't want to teach, so she became a nurse. That was her options.

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And you get many more opportunities for education, many more opportunities for office work. And if you could make the same or better pay, and you get to sit down and type instead of standing up

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for your full shift-- so it does actually-- that means that who's in the sales positions is-- they get a little less of the creme

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de la creme in terms of who they're able to attract, except that you get some top salespeople, especially in the fancier stores, who are making lots of commissions, who have kind of a power from that.

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So that's, I think, one of the big changes that happens. But as I said, some of that gender still stays the same. You've got men sometimes working in more masculine-- men are selling suits.

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Men are selling furniture. They're selling the big-ticket items. But still the vast majority of people who are doing that sort of everyday labour on the selling floor is women.

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Well, the department store emerges at a time when you have what's called separate spheres as a philosophy. So the separate spheres philosophy is this idea that men have the city and public space,

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and women have the home, and the domestic, and the religious, and it's supposed to be really separate. Men go from their suburban home-- a fancy suburban home, at this time.

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But they go from their suburban home into the city to work and come back, and the women stay there-- so this idea that women should be in the home.

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Women are not staying in the home, partly because there's consumption to be done. And part of the work that women are doing is to consume for the family.

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They're the ones who are making sure there's food, making sure there's clothes, making sure you're keeping up with the Joneses. But before the department store, you

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have relatively small shopping districts. Clothing is often being made by dressmakers, so you're going to a dressmaker, or a dressmaker is coming to you, and you're taking your measurements,

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making the clothes out of the fabric you want. So what the department store does is it opens up this new, spectacular space for women in the city.

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The other thing about those older shops is, mostly, they kind of kept everything behind-- you couldn't see everything. You have to go in and say, I would like some blue fabric,

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please. And they would go in the back and pull out a blue fabric and show it to you. And so in the department store, all of a sudden,

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you have this ability. You can touch everything. You can look at everything. You can touch everything.

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You have this kind of freedom. So there's much more control that the person who's running the store has over that shopping experience in those older stores.

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And the people who are working in those stores-- a lot of them are men. They're often proprietors because they also have the right-- they can then say,

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OK, well, I'll let you have that for 20% off. In the department store, one of the things they have is fixed prices. So the shop girls can't let you have anything for 20% off.

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And so that's one transformation. But so the big transformation is, all of a sudden, you have this place in the city that is being constructed and sold as a free club for women.

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This is women's downtown club. They've got shopping, yeah, but they've got tea rooms. They've got parlours where you can hang out and sit. They'll give you paper and pens to write with.

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They've got free childcare. They've got art galleries. They've got post office. They've got hairdresser.

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They've got free concerts. They've got all of this kind of stuff. So you can just go in, and it's like, here's the whole downtown all inside one building--

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no reason to ever leave, and it's this very female space. You're not going to be harassed by men. If you are, somebody's going to get rid of them for you. So it's this very safe place, and so it opens up

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this new kind of possibility. Now, this is especially for middle-class women, especially for white middle-class women-- this new possibility for them in the city that

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really wasn't there before. And then once you have those department stores, then you end up with more other stores around them. And you end up with this really--

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had a little bit of a downtown shopping district before, but now you get this big downtown shopping district. And the interesting thing is that downtown shopping district is nearly always almost the same place as the downtown office

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district. And the reason for this is public transportation and like, OK, valuable land. We're going to build tall.

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Nobody wants an office on the first floor. Everybody wants a shop on the first floor. So you can put shops on the first floor and the office stuff up above.

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Part of what that means is that on those streets, on those streetcars, you have these middle-class women who are coming downtown to shop. You have men who are coming downtown to offices

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and everybody else, as well. And it means that it actually creates a kind of a mixed downtown. It creates a space where men and women are in that space

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together, and they both-- like, they both can say, well, this is my place. The women can say, well, this is my space because this is where I shop.

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And the men can say, well, this is my space because this is where my office is. And this actually gets used by suffrage activists at the turn of the century.

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They sell postcards out of the street outside the department store. They open up their own little shop in San Francisco on the same street

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as the main department store. They convinced the owners of one of the department stores to let them have a stand inside selling equali-tea-- so tea that was for the suffrage movement.

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And they also convinced the shop owners to fill the windows full of things that were in yellow, which was the suffrage colour in California. And so it creates this new possibilities.

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Now, it also is creating new possibilities for women working because it's creating these new workplaces in the middle of the city that are majority female. And you've already got some women working in offices.

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Clerks are mostly male in the 19th century, and that starts shifting. So by the time we get to the 1950s, it's mostly female who are doing that same kind of work.

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But it also helps to create a space for working women in the downtown in a new kind of way. And for a lot of women, this is great because one of their main--

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if they're not educated, one of their main other options is to be working as servants. And working as servants is a terrible job. So that's part of the reason why you

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get what they call "the servant problem" in the turn of the century, where women can't hire servants because those women who they would have hired as servants are going to be working in the stores instead

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because it's a much better job and constant pay. You're not being watched every single second, at least not by a single owner. So one of the things architecturally

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that the stores do to draw in customers is they build grand, new buildings, and they have these big plate glass windows. So plate glass is pretty new-- is a new thing

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in the 19th century. So they're able to put all of these displays in the windows. So window shopping, or as they call it in France, window licking, becomes a thing.

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And you have all those things in the window, and they're really gorgeous, and you start thinking of the dream of having those things or being in that space of the window.

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And they really use displays in a big way. So they're doing the window displays. They're doing really elaborate displays on the inside. They'll do everything all in white,

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and turn the objects into fantasies of other things. Really interestingly, there's one main magazine in the United States that's telling people how to do this, that's explaining all different kinds of special window displays

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and interiors. And it's edited and almost entirely written by L. Frank Baum, the guy who wrote the Oz books. He actually started out in department stores

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and in department store. So all of the magic and the flimflam of The Wizard of Oz is kind of like the flimflam of the department stores. So these really elaborate displays is a big piece of it.

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And then they start doing-- Christmas becomes the big, commercial thing it is partly because of department stores selling Christmas.

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They do the Christmas windows. They do the Christmas displays. They have Santa to bring you in. They do big Easter things.

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They do these kind of ways of creating different reasons. Macy's in New York has its flower show thing where you have to go in and see all the decorations they made out of flowers.

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So they have all of these kind of displays. So that's one part of it-- just spectacle. And part of the idea with spectacle is that's going to overwhelm women.

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You're going to go in, and you're just going to go, oh. And then you lose all logic, and you start buying stuff. That's at least part of the idea. They're also bringing people in with all those services

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that I mentioned. So you're going to go in because you want a place to sit down, and they have a parlour with rocking chairs. You want to hear a free concert.

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Hey, why not? Some stores-- up until, I think, 2011 Nordstrom always had a live pianist in every one of their stores playing. So just that idea of you have a place you can sit.

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You can listen to music. The cafeterias-- cafeterias and tea rooms that are a nice, polite place where you can get a good meal that's not too expensive.

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I went with my grandma. Lots of people went with their grandmas to that-- have an ice cream in Marshall Fields with my grandma. So that becomes-- that's one of the ways they're pulling people

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in. And those are pulling in a range of people. When I've read diaries, even people who don't have a whole lot of money

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but could pass as somebody who might possibly be able to buy something would go in and listen to concerts for free, would go in and sit in those rooms for free.

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The other big thing they're doing, of course, is sales. So having big sales on different kind of particular items-- that's something that's drawing people in. And that's a little bit of everybody,

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but that's even more when you get to a more working-class or a more lower-middle-class population. A number of stores have their discount section, often

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in the basement. So they'll have the things that are imperfect or that have been knocked down a little bit. There was-- I don't know if it's still around,

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but Filene's Basement actually took off as its own separate thing, but it was originally the basement of this department store called Filene's in Boston that had the things that hadn't sold.

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And so you have the discount department, and that discount department is being sold more broadly. You might even find advertisements for that in foreign-language newspapers.

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The advertisements for the sales in the main part of the store-- going to find those in foreign-languages papers. And of course, they're doing advertisements-- advertisements in newspapers, sometimes even

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big signs and things up. So those are the major-- and they're doing catalogues, mailings, those kind of things, especially those stores like Sears

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that are doing a lot of their business by catalogue. But even stores other than Sears-- I can't remember the name of it, but there was a store in Dallas I was reading about that did a lot of its business

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by having people who weren't right in town that could call in and say, I'd like these things, and they would ship them out to them. So a lot of places are doing some business by catalogues,

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as well. So sales, spectacle, service-- I think those are-- and trying to get people to associate that store with their city.

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So for Chicago, it's no longer around, but Marshall Field's really mattered. It was a Chicago store. You had particular-- each place, they

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have particular dishes that are sold in their tea room. And those dishes are the ones that people associate with their city. So you get that kind of loyalty to your store, as well.

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Well, I would say advertising messages mostly reinforce traditional gender roles. But what exactly-- how they're constructing those gender roles shift a bit.

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So partly, they don't advertise to men a whole lot. If it's a place that's selling-- like, Sears sells tools and car things. Then they're going to be advertising to men.

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But most of what a lot of these places are selling are things that are much more associated with the home, or they're assuming that women are sort of at least on the forefront of making those decisions, even though they may

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not make the big-ticket decisions by themselves, and clothing and associated things like that. So most of the advertising is really being focused at women. So from relatively early on, and even more

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as people start getting amateurly into psychology by, like, the 1920s, the idea is that women then are sort of frivolous and irrational and want to be stylish.

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And so they can really play on desires and play on anxieties. So they can show you things and go like, oh, you want these things. Don't you want them?

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Come on. You want them. Or they can be-- and there's really-- there's language

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in not just in things for sellers, but language in guidebooks that are describing women being seduced by goods, being like-- there's a display of chocolates in the window, and the women just

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can't help but go in and buy chocolates-- that kind of idea. And so you have that kind of-- and the anxiety. There's a lot of advertisements that are around the idea of, if you're not using the the right soap,

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your children aren't clean enough, and everyone's pointing at you. So some of that in terms of having the most up-to-date kitchen or the most up-to-date clothing,

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the most up-to-date furniture, all of those kind of things, is definitely a piece of advertising. But then there's another piece, which is what they sometimes refer to as Mrs. Consumer.

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And so this is the idea that-- this is more tied to the idea of home economics-- that women's job is to take care of the family, to make sure everything in the house

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is right, that everybody is fed, that everybody is well-dressed, that everything's going well, that if the boss comes over for dinner, everything's going to go well, all of that kind of stuff.

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And so part of it is keeping up with the Joneses, but there, it's less about women's anxiety than about it being their job. They need to be making sure that everything

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is running smoothly so that the man's job can go up, up, up, up, up. And so what that means is, there, they're selling a little more on a basis of logic.

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And that's often where the sales things come in. They're doing advertisements that are showing why it is economically appropriate to be getting this particular thing.

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So both of those things go alongside each other. Interestingly, for men, they kind of don't pay attention to the fact that men might be anxious, or want things, or whatever

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until relatively late. They're like, we can sell things to men with logic. It doesn't actually work very well because we're all human, and emotions sell things a lot better than logic.

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Logic helps, but emotions are the biggie. So there's a bunch of ways that they can do this. So one of the things is that there's a number of employee manuals and newsletters

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that are being sent out to employees so you can see, how are male and female workers being described, being talked about, being addressed within that sphere of work?

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There's also sources that are about-- that are management sources, so you can also see how management is thinking about the workers, how management is thinking about the shoppers.

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So you can get all these different kinds of points of view. There's lots and lots of advertising stuff in here. So advertising is incredibly rich for--

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those are the things that you can analyse to say, how are men being described here? How are women being described here? What's going on in these different ads?

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And what's really great is that they're over a long time period. They're across multiple countries, so you can really see, are things

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happening in the same kind of ways? What are different kinds of ways that these same advertising strategies are playing out in different places? And then along with the advertising,

00:29:37.990 - 00:29:48.460

there's also catalogues. So catalogues are great for being able to see, for example, how are they selling sometimes the same thing differently

00:29:48.460 - 00:30:00.940

to different people? How are they selling pens, and pocket knives, and sneakers to women and to men. And sometimes, it's astonishingly different--

00:30:00.940 - 00:30:19.830

how they're describing the same kind of object. So there's a lot of richness there. So the thing that I'm really excited about with this collection is how international it is.

00:30:19.830 - 00:30:27.930

So it's broad-ranging, as I mentioned. It's got employee documents. It's got management documents. It's got advertising.

00:30:27.930 - 00:30:37.740

It's got this really-- it's got photographs, which, as an architectural historian, I get really excited about because there I can see how did they actually-- not just descriptions of displays,

00:30:37.740 - 00:30:45.880

but how did they actually do those displays? What did these spaces look like? Who's in those photographs? All of those things, I think, become really exciting.

00:30:45.880 - 00:30:56.130

But the other piece that is really exciting to me is how international it is-- so that there's sources from multiple countries so that we can really begin to do

00:30:56.130 - 00:31:10.350

a real firsthand, interdisciplinary, international exploration because, as an American working primarily in the US, I have much more access to resources

00:31:10.350 - 00:31:24.010

that are about America. I can manage to get the grocery store journals from the US. I can't get hold of the grocery store journals from England. I can't get hold of the ones from Australia.

00:31:24.010 - 00:31:33.640

The libraries of the US don't necessarily have them. So being able to say, OK, how are people doing this in Australia? How are people doing this in England?

00:31:33.640 - 00:31:47.080

How are people doing this in the US? What are the commonalities? What are the things that are different? I think that's-- and each place has its own gender structures

00:31:47.080 - 00:31:52.060

going on. Each place very much also has its own racial structures going on. I think that's another piece of something

00:31:52.060 - 00:32:01.270

that we can dig into, potentially, in all these places-- different kinds of relationships to immigrants in all of these different countries--

00:32:01.270 - 00:32:07.440

and really be able to do this comparative work that's been incredibly hard to do otherwise.