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.
Part 1, Chapter 4-Part 2, Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Hortense’s First Job”
By 1932, the Odlum family had grown, and Hortense took a great deal of personal satisfaction from her role as a dutiful wife and mother. She told her sister Anne that she could not imagine leaving her home in order to work. Hortense’s distaste at the idea of a professional career reflected a popular backlash in her time against women in the workplace. As the Great Depression escalated, many argued that women should surrender their jobs to out-of-work men. The Federal Economy Act of 1932 dictated that federal agencies reducing their staff should fire married female employees first, arguing that they had husbands to support them.
Hortense felt she had no need to work. Since coming to New York, Floyd had transitioned from law to finance, and his firm was one of the few that managed to escape the financial crash of 1929. This financial privilege enabled Floyd to buy flailing companies like the department store Bonwit Teller and sell or revitalize them. Unfamiliar with department stores, he turned to Hortense for help. Satow argues that Floyd may have also hoped the store would distract Hortense from his ongoing affair with a Sak’s Fifth Avenue manicurist (and future aviator) Jackie Cochran. Satow speculates that Hortense may have accepted the job to grow closer to her increasingly distant husband. Regardless of their motivations, Hortense flourished at Bonwit Teller. Her early decision to move hat displays to the front of the store where women might buy them impulsively provides evidence of her keen intuition as a marketer.
Part 1, Interlude 2 Summary: “Bessie Harrison Becomes a Buyer”
In 1904, 16-year-old Bessie Harrison lived with her family of eight in a small apartment in San Francisco. After an infected finger left her father, a tailor, out of work, Bessie was forced to quit school and take a job in a department store for $4 per week. Bessie quickly identified the store as a place where hard work would be rewarded. In the department store’s employee tea room, Bessie learned that young women who were engaged often left their jobs after getting married, and resolved not to let her personal life interfere with her career.
During her first holiday season, Bessie was given a small sales assignment. After some initial confusion, Bessie began outselling her colleagues, and was promoted to sales full time, doubling her paycheck. As she learned more about the store’s management, she set a new goal: to be a buyer, travelling the world to find new merchandise for the store. A few weeks later, she was promoted again to assistant buyer. Bessie’s meteoric rise was halted by the Great Earthquake of 1906, which destroyed the store completely and left nearly 250,000 people unhoused. When the store reopened, she returned to her position in sales until a former colleague brought her on to his new business. Within five years, she had been promoted to buyer, earning $10,000 per year. In an interview, she encouraged young girls to work in department stores and to focus on their careers over relationships with men.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “President Hortense”
Hortense Odlum took on the role of president of Bonwit Teller in October 1934, having never held a job before. She was the first female president of a major department store in a time when female executives were rare, and often diminished her role in the press in order to maintain a sense of domestic femininity. She openly acknowledged her inexperience, and Bonwit Teller’s advertising knowingly referred to her as a “fresh take” on the department store business.
From the beginning, Hortense took an active role in the daily running of the store, addressing both employee complaints and customer complaints directly. As the wife of a wealthy businessman, Hortense knew that wealthy women who enjoyed shopping at Bonwit Teller would be its best advertisers, encouraging friends to shop there too. However, she also remembered her harried experience shopping as a young mother, and met with manufacturers to design and produce a series of simple, well-made dresses for shoppers on a budget.
Under Hortense’s direction, Bonwit Teller added a beauty salon with an imported French stylist, an artistic salon for haute couture, a men’s club for private shopping with whiskey and cigars, and air conditioning. She also oversaw the release of Polly Tucker: Merchant, a best-selling novel about a young woman embarking on a glamorous career in a fictional department store, and a complementary line of clothing for young career women. As a result of Hortense’s efforts, Bonwit Teller became one of the most fashionable and profitable department stores in New York City.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Dorothy’s American Look”
Part 2 begins with a quote by Dorothy Shaver, claiming that she’d prefer an exciting career over a boring marriage. High fashion was born in Paris in the mid-19th century when Charles Frederick Worth opened the House of Worth in Paris. For nearly a century, French fashion defined itself through couture—elaborate designs custom-tailored for wealthy patrons. When wealthy Americans brought French fashion back to the States, American manufacturers began copying French designs, flooding the market with affordable copies of French originals manufactured cheaply with less expensive materials.
Dorothy Shaver realized that French couture was largely impractical for American lifestyles, and that Lord & Taylor needed to feature designers more attuned to American culture. The result was an advertising campaign naming three American female designers as ambassadors of a distinctly American look. When Paris fell under Nazi occupation in 1940, the closing of French fashion houses necessitated further investment in American designers. Lord & Taylor opened a boutique within the store that only sold clothing and accessories by American designers.
As a result of Dorothy’s efforts, the editors of Vogue began to feature American designers more prominently and founded New York Fashion Week—efforts designed to increase national pride during the war. Dorothy also supported the war effort by redesigning the uniforms used by U.S. Army nurses. Although they redesign was celebrated by nurses and Army staff, some criticized the fact that it included trousers in addition to skirts. As the growing defense industry recruited eligible white workers into factory jobs, Lord & Taylor hired its first Black saleswomen.
Part 1, Chapter 4-Part 2, Chapter 6 Analysis
This section of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue reveals the historical tension inherent to The Changing Roles of Women in 20th-Century America by highlighting the contrasting perspectives of Hortense Odlum and Dorothy Shaver. Hortense Odlum’s commentary on gender roles during her tenure as president of Bonwit Teller suggests that she believed being a woman was antithetical to running a business. In her autobiography, Hortense wrote that she “made up [her] mind when [she] accepted the job […] that [she] would not allow it to take all [her] energy so that [she] had nothing left when [she] joined my children” (97). Although she accepted her husband’s challenge to revitalize the department store, Hortense “refused to become a career woman at the price of the happiness of [her] family” (97). These passages suggest that Hortense believed the balance between her career and family life to be a zero-sum situation: if she gave the store all her energy, there would be nothing left for her family—success at the store came at the price of her duties at home.
Satow asserts that despite her attitude toward her career, Hortense excelled in her position, pointing to the book’s thematic interest in The Benefits of Women in Leadership. On the first day of her tenure as president, Hortense famously claimed that she “didn’t feel like a president, [she] felt like a frightened woman!” (95). Satow argues that this claim, which presents leadership and femininity as opposites, was Hortense’s way of “diminishing her business accomplishments in a bid to retain her feminine bona fides” and avoid alienating her male colleagues (95). Media coverage of her presidency included Bonwit Teller advertisements “emphasizing ‘a woman’s sixth sense’ and touting how Bonwit was being ‘guided by a woman president’s womanly intuition’” (97). The repeated references to Hortense’s gender in these ads suggest that, despite her stated belief that women could not lead, Hortense capitalized on her identity as a woman to expand the store’s influence and draw customers to Bonwit Teller. Satow’s depiction of Hortense’s tenure indicates that she used her role as a woman to achieve her business goals, despite her expressed belief that femininity was antithetical to leadership.
In addition, Satow directly connects Hortense’s improvements at Bonwit Teller to her own lived experience as a woman. As the wife of a successful financial tycoon, Hortense “had spent all [her] free time at luncheons and bridges” with wealthy women and knew “what most [wealthy] women talk[ed] about” (99). At the same time, she also “recalled the somewhat traumatic experience of being a young mother, new to New York, and on a tight budget” (100). As she began her redesign of Bonwit Teller, “Hortense envisioned a store that served the young, harried mother on a budget, as well as the well-heeled wives who played bridge” (101). The repetition of the phrases “mother on a budget” directly references Hortense’s own experiences as the foundation for Bonwit Teller’s business ethos under her leadership. In her private letters, Hortense explicitly admitted that the role of housewife prepared her to be president of Bonwit Teller, asking whether there was “such a great difference between the job of a woman as wife and mother and her job as a president of a woman’s specialty store?” (98). The overlap between Hortense’s roles as an executive and as a housewife reflects the discourse of the time around the changing roles of women in 20th-century America.
