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 2, Interlude 3-Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Interlude 3 Summary: “Fashion is Spinach”
In 1925, American designer Elizabeth Hawes arrived in Paris to begin work at a copy house, a manufacturer that produced less-expensive versions of high fashion dresses. The house where Elizabeth worked was run by a French woman named Madame Doret, who was famous for using the same materials and finishings as the originals. Sometimes the originals were purchased surreptitiously by employees like Hawes; other times, they were brought to the copy house by customers who traded access to originals for discounts on copies of other designs. In one instance, an American buyer named Ellis allowed Elizabeth to take eight Chanel suits purchased for American clients to Madame Doret’s copy house for the afternoon. After sketchers copied the design and took careful measurements, Elizabeth returned the suits to Ellis, who shipped them off to her clients in America.
After leaving Madame Doret’s house, Elizabeth took a job with an American manufacturer who required her to copy designs at fashion shows. Some houses tolerated this practice; others, like Chanel, immediately removed sketchers. When Elizabeth was caught sketching, she returned to America and began an independent career as a designer.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Geraldine at Glamour”
In 1947, 23 year old Geraldine Stutz was hired at Glamour magazine despite her lack of experience because of her innate sense of style. Geraldine was joining the workforce at an opportune time for women. As the second World War took men away from the workforce, the Great Depression-era backlash against working women faded, and women bean to rejoin the workforce. Glamour, a publication explicitly aimed at working women, featured articles about achieving work-life balance, succeeding in interviews, and dressing for the office.
Geraldine was raised in Evanston, Illinois by a single mother who was forced to return to the workforce when her husband abandoned their family. After college, she entered Vogue magazine’s prestigious Prix de Paris contest. Although she didn’t win, she caught the attention of editor Mary Campbell, who encouraged her to pursue writing. Within two years, she was at Glamour. In 1954, Geraldine left Glamour to join the shoe company, I. Miller, as fashion coordinator. Her $40,000 salary (the contemporary equivalent of $400,000) made her one of the highest-paid women in fashion. Within a year, she was promoted to vice president of retail. When I. Miller’s parent company bought a struggling department store called Henri Bendel, Geraldine was chosen to revitalize it.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Hortense Has a Rival”
In 1939, Salvador Dalí was commissioned to decorate two windows in the Fifth Avenue façade of Bonwit Teller. He posed a scantily-clad mannequin in one and a faux-burning bed in the other, disturbing passersby, who insisted that the windows be taken down. When Dalí returned to find his installations removed, he caused such a scene that he was ultimately arrested.
From the inception of the department store as an entity, windows have provided a vital way for merchants to reach consumers. As department stores developed increasingly elaborate displays, nearly 40% of sales were attributed to impulse buys inspired by window shopping. Windows were also used for political messaging, such as advertising war bonds during World War I or advocating for women’s suffrage in 1916.
As Hortense dealt with Dalí’s displeasure at the removal of his displays in Bonwit Teller, her husband Floyd was having an affair with Jackie Cochran, a manicurist-turned-pilot whose brash and adventurous spirit sharply contrasted Hortense’s demure persona. Jackie and Floyd maintained their affair for four years before Hortense divorced Floyd, citing extreme cruelty as the reason for the demise of their marriage. Devastated, Hortense moved out of their shared home and into a hotel apartment. She married twice more, but both marriages were short-lived. In 1940, after six years as president of Bonwit Teller, she resigned, blaming her career for the dissolution of her personal life.
Part 2, Interlude 4 Summary: “The Real Rachel Menken”
The television show Mad Men, which first aired in 2007, follows the romantic conquests of New York advertising executive Don Draper—notably, Rachel Mencken, a young Jewish executive at the fictional department store run by her father. The inspiration for this character was Beatrice Fox Auerbach, who took over her family’s Connecticut department store, G. Fox, following the death of her father in 1938. Beatrice broke precedent with local stores by hiring Black workers for both management and sales positions, even in departments like lingerie, where contact between Black salespeople and white customers remained especially taboo. She was recognized for her efforts by the NAACP and the National Urban League. In 1965, she sold G. Fox to the May department store chain for $41 million dollars (the contemporary equivalent of $380 million).
Satow describes the long history of Jewish women in American fashion merchandising. One notable example is Mary Ann Cohen, whose dress shop became a franchised women’s clothing store in the early 1900s in San Francisco. She remained active in the business until her death at age 94. Another notable Jewish retailer, Lena Himmelstein the founder of Lane Bryant, revolutionized maternity wear and size-inclusive clothing.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “President Dorothy”
Dorothy Shaver became president of Lord & Taylor in 1945, receiving a salary of $110,000 per year (the contemporary equivalent of $1.5 million). A glowing profile of Dorothy in Life magazine called her America’s premiere career woman, while noting that she made less than her male counterparts at other companies. Dorothy combated this inequality by emphasizing her femininity in order to make her leadership less offensive to men.
Under Dorothy’s leadership, Lord & Taylor established a niche as the department store of choice for upper-middle class women looking for reliable style rather than prestigious high fashion. Her improvements to the store—such as babysitting services and petite sizing—reflected her understanding of the specific needs of women. She also updated the store’s advertising to appeal to women and feature the work of female artists like Dorothy Hood, whose iconic paintings stood out among the text-based advertisements common at the time.
Throughout Dorothy’s time as president of Lord & Taylor, she used her influence to advocate for issues important to her. At the annual Lord & Taylor American Design Awards, Dorothy delivered speeches against racist and totalitarian movements growing in post-war America, and arguing for the rights of nonconformist thinkers and writers.
Part 2, Interlude 3-Chapter 9 Analysis
This section of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue demonstrates the novel’s thematic influence in the Benefits of Women in Leadership through the examples of Satow’s featured female executives. Satow’s profiles of Lena Himmelstein and Dorothy Shaver evidence the tangible benefits of including a female perspective in business decisions. Her depiction of these women suggests that their lived experiences as women enabled them to see problems their male counterparts ignored, to the benefit of their businesses. In the interlude titled “The Real Rachel Mencken,” Satow describes how dressmaker-turned-retailer Lena Himmelstein built her brand, Lane Bryant, by focusing on women’s unique needs. In a time when “newspapers held to prudish rules that forbade advertisements for maternity wear, deeming it unseemly,” Lena pushed to expand her brand’s maternity offerings and advertise them explicitly as such (182). Lane Bryant’s revolutionary ads boasted that their maternity clothes allowed “the expectant mother [to] feel as other women feel because she looks as other women look” (183). Satow implies that Lena’s own experiences during her three pregnancies inspired her claim that “a woman should think and live as normally as possible” while pregnant. The vast success of Lane Bryant’s maternity wear, which influenced a new market for women’s clothing, highlights the benefits of women in leadership positions, as Lena was able to grow a successful business in an untapped market.
In Chapter 9, Satow describes the various improvements Dorothy Shaver made at Lord & Taylor as President as evidence of the ways in which Dorothy’s lived experience as a woman benefited the company’s status and bottom line. One of Dorothy’s trademarks was the development of new departments within established categories such as women’s clothing. Under her leadership, Lord & Taylor opened two new departments designed to meet women’s specific needs. The first were the so-called College Shops designed for “young women who wanted stylish yet affordable clothes” as they entered college and new careers (188). Satow implies that Dorothy’s experiences as a young college student and career woman directly inspired the development of this department. She also designed a department for “petite customers under five feet four,” a market that had not been identified by male executives but was immediately recognizable to Dorothy, whose petite sister Elsie weighed “just ninety pounds” (32). Although Dorothy herself was not a mother, her awareness of the needs of young mothers led her to open “the Milk Bar, where mothers could drop off their children with a nurse while they shopped” at Lord & Taylor (188). Like the College Shops and petite stores, Satow frames the Milk Bar as an innovation that reflected Dorothy’s uniquely female perspective. The success of these departments and services reinforced the tangible benefits of women in leadership positions, highlighting The Changing Roles of Women in 20th-Century America.
This section of the book also demonstrates Satow’s interest in intersectional feminism. The concept of intersectionality was developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw as a way of understanding how systems of oppression and privilege can compound given individual identities. The interlude titled “The Real Rachel Mencken” describes how Jewish women working in retail overcame the combination of misogyny and anti-Semitism to build their careers. Building on her discussion of racist marginalization, injustice, and violence in her section on Maggie Lena Walker, Satow argues that these Jewish women experienced marginalization on multiple fronts—as a result of gender, race, ethnicity, and/or religious affiliation—affecting their access, resources, and privilege as well as how they were perceived and treated. Satow suggests that Beatrice Fox Auerbach, understood the challenges faced by non-white, non-Christian women, and intentionally “broke with precedent” by employing Black workers (179). The fact that Auerbach also employed a Black hiring agent suggests that she sought to appeal specifically to Black workers as potential employees. Satow highlights Auerbach’s example to demonstrate the value of intersectional thinking within organizations.
