Las reinas de Estado: Consumo, grandes tiendas y mujeres en la modernización del comercio de Santiago (1880–1930)

Abstract

Jacqueline Dussaillant, a graduate of the Catholic University of Chile’s outstanding history department and currently a professor in that institution, displays in this book deep research and innovative interpretation to give us a fascinating study of the ways that a growing middle class of Chilean women, beginning in the later nineteenth century, interacted with the new multifloor department stores to create a more vibrant social life in the heart of the old colonial capital of Santiago, along with new forms of female sociability and gender relations.Dussaillant begins with an account of the changes in urban geography fundamentally brought about by Chile’s entry into the thriving Atlantic economy through the export of sodium nitrate, or salitre, and the subsequent rise in urban population and income. Already by 1875, Horace Rumbold, the British consul in Santiago, noticed the long quiet streets of private houses, mostly built after the fashion of the Parisian petit hotel, which might figure with credit in the Bois de Boulogne. The models of elegance, Rumbold remarked, were all French.The conquest of additional nitrate-rich provinces from Peru and Bolivia in 1880 poured wealth into the middle and upper reaches of Chilean society. Santiago grew: new avenues lined with residential mansions spread outward, linked to the city center by a network of streetcars and trolleys that provided easy access to the growing number of modern, mainly French-owned stores downtown, all within a few blocks of the sixteenth-century colonial Plaza Mayor. Dussaillant demonstrates with a series of maps the changing urban densities and transportation networks in which a new kind of store and a very different “shopping” culture emerged, following French antecedents.The first grands magasins, or department stores, appeared in Paris. Le Bon Marché was followed by Printemps in 1865 and Galeries Lafayette a few years later, their revolving doors opening onto the Boulevard Haussmann. They displayed many of the features later copied in the United States and Latin America, including iron and concrete construction, multiple levels, elevators, electric lights (by 1888 at Printemps), a grand array of departments and goods, fixed prices, and highly trained, attentive salespeople. In the United States, Macy’s opened in Manhattan in 1878, and by 1902 its enormous store on Herald Square was thought to be the largest store in the world.At the same time, in smaller-market Santiago de Chile in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, French investors had established conventional stores such as the Casa Muzard, Casa Pra, and Casa Francesa in the city center, but the first department store was the legendary and elegant Gath y Chaves founded on Estado Street in 1910 by a British-Argentine partnership.The interaction — indeed, the interdependence — of the new stores together with more prosperous female consumers, better access to the city center via streetcars and automobiles, and newly professional advertising increasingly directed toward women consumers transformed Santiago’s culture of consumption. But the stores themselves, veritable “cathedrals of consumption” with as many as 40 separate departments under the same roof, were the magnets that drew Chilean women out of the house into new commercial practice and a new social space. Well-dressed women strolled leisurely along handsome and well-kept streets and shopping became safe and attractive. Moreover, such places as the elegant fourth-floor tearoom installed by Gath y Chaves in 1921 immediately became the place to see and be seen.Changes in language expressed the changing reality. Women, attracted by displays of goods behind the large plate glass windows, began to “window shop” or vitrinear (a new verb). Other terms revealed a change in buying practice: in earlier times, women might simply “ir a comprar” (go out to buy a specific item); now they were more inclined to “ir de compras” (go shopping). Women “come out,” meet and associate with other women, find common interests and a common culture, and play a larger role in decisions regarding the family budget. Older social codes of behavior break down; education and the right to vote follow.Dussaillant is far too sophisticated to trace an unbroken line from Gath y Chaves to female emancipation, but her original and deeply pondered study nicely illustrates how the Chilean version of the French grand magasin discovered the potential of middle- and upper-class women as consumers while the women themselves became, in contemporary opinion, freer, “más libres,” and more secular than their counterparts in most other Latin American republics.