Shop Girl Research Articles

Troll Magic: Hidden Folk from the Mountains and Forests of Norway

Troll Magic: Hidden Folk from the Mountains and Forests of Norway

Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse

Reviewed by: Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse Frederic Ponten Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich. By Viola Rühse. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. 328. Paper €69.95. ISBN 978-3110705751. The main topic of Viola Rühse's book is Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and his early occupation with film as a journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s in Frankfurt and Berlin, as well as during his exile as a freelance writer in Paris from 1933 to 1941. His escape to the USA after the German attack against France serves as a biographical endpoint of Rühse's study, even though Kracauer's later prominent book publications on film, such as From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960), serve as a necessary horizon to understanding both continuities and ruptures in his work, most of which has been edited in the important Werkausgabe (2004–2012). The book neither aims to give an entirely new picture of Kracauer's early work, nor does it attempt to radically reorient views on Weimar cinema or 1920s film theory and largely follows in its general assessments the standard literature on the topic by Inka [End Page 167] Mülder-Bach, Miriam Hansen, and Helmut Stalder. In fact, the book's scope is pleasantly modest, as it promises to direct attention to some of the—so far—overlooked or underresearched Kracauer texts (and drafts) and their contexts. This leads Rühse, by examining archival materials in Kracauer's Nachlass and recently digitized collections of early twentieth-century journals and newspapers (19), to trace—with surprising intensity and depth—not only motifs in Kracauer's writing, but also social history, cultural history, media history, architectural history, and art history. The book sets off to a slow start: the introduction (chapter one) develops the topic of the book and mainly provides the state of the art of Kracauer research; the writing, particularly of the first pages, is unfortunately hindered by stylistic infelicities and would have benefitted from further copy-editing. The second chapter, the weakest of the seven chapters, highlights Kracauer's well-known reception of Karl Grune's film Die Straße (1923) in several publications. An excursus however, "die Analyse des Publikationskontextes des Aufsatzes 'Der Künstler in dieser Zeit'" (52), a text first published for the Jewish-German journal Der Morgen, adds an important piece to the puzzle of Kracauer's complicated relationship to his Jewish family background and the religious motifs in his thought. Chapter three dives into the social history of leftist film criticism and situates Kracauer's work on the spectrum of early political writing about film in Weimar Germany and shows for the first time the main quality of Rühse's book, which lies in its meticulous reconstruction of so far marginalized figures and voices that are in direct or indirect dialog with Kracauer's work. The same is true for the author's historicization of Kracauer's famous series of texts titled "Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino" (1927). Rühse is able to reconstruct—against Kracauer's stereotypical views of the young unmarried women working in low-paying sales jobs—a perspective of these women that entails far more agency and film critical competencies than the common view of the "shop girl," held by most male intellectuals in the 1920s. Kracauer himself, as Rühse points out (99), arrived only later at a more nuanced position in his article "Mädchen im Beruf" (1932). Chapter four, the strongest chapter of the book, takes on Kracauer, the trained architect-turned-journalist, and his perspective on historic cinematic spaces. Rühse provides important contextualizations of the history of cinema architecture and its social history for Kracauer's famous essay "Kult der Zerstreuung" (1926) and his article "Kino in der Münzstraße" (1932). Rühse sheds light on how to situate Kracauer's writings on the pompous UFA Lichtspielpaläste, and on the role of cinemas frequented by the working class, who were threatened by unemployment after the financial crisis in 1929. Chapter five presents the largely...

The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism: White Working-class Women and Femininity in Johannesburg Department Stores, 1930s–1970s

AbstractBased on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.

Dance, mobility and social change in Billy Elliot: The Musical

Billy Elliot: The Musical addresses the issue of class that, while seldom analysed as a theme in Broadway musicals, has been a key trope of the majority of British musicals since the première of The Shop Girl in 1894. The article examines how the dialectic of dance as an emblem of individual freedom opposed to the rigidity of the British class system is expressed through movement within the mining community of Easington. By utilizing various aspects of Rudolf Laban’s effort theory, including the kinetic personality patterns of his associate, Warren Lamb, the article examines the cultural gendering of movement via the strict regimes of boxing (for boys) and ballet (for girls). With brief references to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Brecht’s praxis of Gestus, the article illustrates how Billy’s ability to embrace a supposedly ‘feminine’ kinetic vocabulary constitutes the flexibility to free himself from the rigid and inherently homophobic definition of conventional masculinity. In promoting movement beyond the confines of an outmoded tradition of working-class behaviour, Billy embraces a classless notion of postmodern masculinity represented in the bohemian milieu of the metropolitan artist. By ‘dancing’ his freedom for the Royal Ballet’s audition panel in ‘Electricity’, Billy embodies his own liberation from the repetitive pattern of movement that inevitably sends the miners to early graves while he flies upwards to defy the typical destiny of a miner. The article explicates key moments of movement and dance in order to exemplify the embodiment of the musical’s central tropes in kinetic terms.

The Girl Behind the Counter: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones and the Modern Shop Girl

The Girl Behind the Counter: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones and the Modern Shop Girl

‘The Waste of Daylight’: Rhythmicity, Workers’ Health and Britain’s Edwardian Daylight Saving Time Bills

SummaryThis article explores an interesting episode in the history of time, health, and modernity: Britain’s 1908 and 1909 Daylight Saving Time (DST) Bills. While the original DST scheme was unsuccessful, the discussions surrounding its implementation reveal tensions central to early twentieth century modernity, namely between industrial time and ‘natural’ bodily rhythms. This article argues that DST was essentially a public health measure aimed at improving the conditions of indoor workers like shop girls and clerks through government regulation of the private time of the labouring classes. Drawing on the extensive evidence provided to two House of Commons Special Committees, this article reveals how DST debates drew together contemporary discussions around sunlight therapy, night work, and the importance of regular sleeping and eating to tackle Britain's endemic urban diseases like consumption and anaemia. I suggest that the idea of bodily rhythms was increasingly important in medical thinking in this period and that the study of rhythmicity points to the potential for incorporating temporality as an analytical category in medical history.

Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances

Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances

Nell Nelson's Undercover Reporting

On assignment for the Chicago Times in the late 1880s, Nell Nelson was commissioned by the newspaper to pose as a shop girl in Chicago factories. She was among many stunt girl reporters who were hired to do dangerous or unusual tasks then write about them. Stunt girls exposed corruption, at the same time providing entertainment for their readers. Nelson's firsthand accounts in “City Slave Girls of Chicago” detailed labor conditions of poor, working-class women. The Chicago series of twenty-one articles were collected into a book and resumed in the New York World. Nelson's sympathetic narratives attracted readers and inspired public debate for labor reform, which provided more evidence that women could write compelling investigative news stories.

The Heart of Capitalism: Contested Visions of Labor Reform in Lurana Sheldon's Department Store Novels

The Heart of Capitalism:Contested Visions of Labor Reform in Lurana Sheldon's Department Store Novels Ashley Elizabeth Palmer On 6 May 1890, the Working Women's Society (wws) of New York sponsored a meeting at Chickering Hall to protest working conditions in the city's department stores. Although it was led by middle-class men, the meeting obliquely featured one woman's voice when a male speaker read wws secretary Alice Woodbridge's harrowing account of the "miseries of the poor women" working in department stores ("To Help"). Woodbridge's "Report on the Condition of Working Women in New York Retail Stores" details physical and emotional hardships ranging from exhausting working hours to repulsive sanitary conditions. The circumstances she reveals were so extreme that speakers at the meeting pronounced their reform efforts "a battle for humanity" to "struggle for the emancipation of these poor women" ("To Help"). The meeting's goal was to expose the hardships of shopgirl labor to middle-class consumers who typically experienced department stores from only the other side of the counter. But although reformers arranged the meeting to enlighten middle-class consumers, the majority of attendees were in fact shopgirls. Demonstrably invested in their own welfare, shopgirls showed up in such large numbers that one news story observed that "there were more shop girls than consumers or clergymen" in attendance ("To Better"). Addressing them directly, the speakers encouraged the shopgirls to "combine for their own protection" ("The Interests"). The Chickering Hall meeting raised concerns about department-store labor reform that would reverberate not only through Progressive Era discourse but also through popular literature over the next two decades. Fiction using the department store for its main setting can help us understand how turn-of-the-century authors grappled with the complexities of labor reform within the nation's consumer palaces. American literary criticism that examines consumerism [End Page 106] at the turn of the century rarely considers the service industry labor behind consumer culture; such criticism has instead prioritized consumers' experiences and perspectives.1 While the critical emphasis on consumer culture is a productive perspective, we risk losing sight of the laboring people who enabled that consumption. For one formerly successful but now nearly forgotten author, Lurana Sheldon, the department store—where labor and consumption meet across the counter—served as an ideal space to consider possible models of labor reform. Two of her novels, For Gold or Soul? A Story of a Great Department Store (1900) and For Humanity's Sake: A Story of the Department Stores (1900–1901), offer a counternarrative to the scenes of glamorized consumption proffered by such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Émile Zola.2 Instead, Sheldon's novels enter the space of the department store expressly to illustrate the hardships its workers suffered. In this respect, her work echoes Zola's emphasis on the workers' lives in Au bonheur des dames (1883; The Ladies' Paradise) as he traces Denise Baudu's physically demanding and mentally discouraging experience as a department-store shopgirl. Sheldon's novels expand upon this interest in the figure of the shopgirl by envisioning reforms to alleviate her hardships in these massive, often corrupt sites of capitalist consumerism.3 In doing so, Sheldon's work both depicts and reshapes the world of department-store labor illuminated by the Chickering Hall meeting, pushing beyond existing nineteenth-century reform efforts in the United States to envision more just circumstances for female retail workers. Analyzing two of Sheldon's out-of-print novels published between 1900 and 1901, this essay explores how Sheldon worked within her cultural and political contexts to imagine possibilities of labor reform. Recovering Sheldon's work reveals the capacity for imagination that American writers brought to reform; the visions she presents for change in these novels include benevolent management, unified workers, labor-conscious consumerism, and labor unions that encompass both management and workforce. Yet if these novels suggest alternatives to labor exploitation from within consumer culture, they also reveal the limitations of such impulses. Despite Sheldon's evident sympathy for the plight of the shopgirl, even the most radical changes her novels envision retain systems of top-down reform that often leave the shopgirl...

The Sexual Novel: James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime

The Sexual Novel: James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime Jeffrey Meyers (bio) Reynolds Price called James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967) “as perfect as any American fiction I know.”1 But this admirable novel has two notable imperfections. The narrator admits that he describes scenes that he cannot possibly have witnessed. And the theme stated by the hero and the narrator is different from the one that emerges from the characters and action. Salter’s comments on the novel describe a different book than the one he actually wrote. Salter’s short, compressed novel, the story of a love affair, takes place in 1962–63. The two main characters are Phillip Dean, a twenty-four-year-old American, and his lover Anne-Marie Costallat, an eighteen-year-old French girl. Phillip is a schoolboy hero and math prodigy who has dropped out of Yale after a year, traveled in Mexico and California, and is trying to find his true self. He comes from a wealthy family but has no money of his own, and must borrow funds from his father, sister, sister’s friend, and the narrator. His mother has committed suicide. Their story is told by an unnamed, thirty-year-old narrator whose life touches but is quite separate from theirs. It begins with the narrator’s autumn train journey from the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Autun, a provincial town 185 miles southeast of the capital, and ends with Phillip’s trip back to Paris the following summer. The book is based on Salter’s own experience. During the Berlin crisis in 1961 he was recalled to active duty as an Air Force pilot. Married to a wife left behind in America, he was stationed in Chaumont in central France, where he had a love affair with a local girl. Phillip penetrates the secret life of France through Anne-Marie, who “is able to summon up all of the black countryside that surrounds them.”2 He first sees her in a dance hall in Dijon and soon rescues her from the company of American soldiers. Born in Nancy, she is the daughter of a Belgian [End Page 564] father who divorced her mother and remarried, and has inherited a difficult stepfather. She has been seduced the previous year, during her first summer away from home, by an Italian waiter. Anne-Marie has a shop girl’s face, wears cheap clothes, looks like a tramp, and is not sufficiently presentable to introduce to his family. He disapproves of Anne-Marie’s interest in trashy magazines, but does not try to teach her or improve her taste. With scant knowledge of each other’s language, they have little to say and are mostly silent. Their talk is inevitably banal: her shoes and her work at the office. They express their feelings in sex. Anne-Marie is attracted to Phillip’s luxurious Delage automobile, which he has borrowed from a friend and is part of the glamorous image he wants to convey. (He has also borrowed money, the house in Autun, and even, as it were, Anne-Marie herself.) The low-slung car—with a long hood, high metal grill, and huge yellow headlights—can reach a speed of 100 miles per hour. At one point, Phillip is stopped by the police for reckless driving and he sees a fatal motorcycle accident that foreshadows his own death. His dangerous driving in this novel matches the daring downhill skiing, mountain climbing, and wartime flying in Salter’s other works. The lovers have no real destination—the journey not the arrival matters—and enjoy the pure pleasure of restless, escapist wanderings from Burgundy to Brittany. Apart from visits to the châteaux on the Loire, they avoid churches, museums, and tourist sites, and confine themselves to sitting in cafés, looking at storefronts, and walking along the rivers. Their aimless trip is the external representation of their leisurely exploration of each other. Anne-Marie is not a nymphomaniac, but is willing to please Phillip in every possible way. Always eager to arouse him, she is even more keen on sex than he is. The rhythm of Salter...

Moda da Bahia: An Analysis of Contemporary Vendor Dress in Salvador

This article discusses the history related to the “traditional” Baianan dress worn by women in contemporary tourist areas of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Examining fugitive slave advertisements, travel diaries and images from the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that the dress of twenty-first century vendors in tourist areas of Salvador maintains a close visual and personal connection to the dress of female slaves. Goffman’s theory of personal front and Sansi’s theories on cultural appropriation in Afro-Brazilian traditions serve as the framework to assess characteristics of the twenty-first-century dress of acarajé vendors and shop girls in Salvador that are based on nineteenth-century female slave clothing, addressing components of cultural authentication in terms of a shift from slave imagery to one of pride in heritage and African culture (and commercial gain).

Fashion by Chance 1960–1974: A Visual Autobiography

Fashion by Chance charts the journey of an Italian woman, Cleonice Capece, from the start of her career as a shop girl in London to an established fashion designer in Rome with global stockists. Th...

Out of the Archive: Woolfian Domestic Economies

Out of the Archive:Woolfian Domestic Economies Sara Crangle (bio) 15 February 1924 Hogarth House, Richmond Mary!!!!! The usual shortage of letter paper makes it necessary to use this professional sheet. Don’t you smell me? I am like a civet. Leonard detests me. I think myself too, too, too lovely. Yes: you’ve entirely altered my life, and given a new channel for vanity to flow in. As you may have guessed, that inexplicable and most detestable prudery which for 10 years led me to make sanitary towels out of Kapok down rather than buy them, has always prevented me from saying to a powdered shop girl “I too am a woman. … I want powder too.” Now you have removed an inhibition, ruined a home, intoxicated a heart, and made me for life your slave, suppliant, servant, debtor. “I am like a civet”—an African mammal whose perineal glands are harvested for the strong-smelling musk they produce.1 So writes Virginia Woolf to Bloomsbury member Mary Hutchinson, while baiting her addressee to inhale her new odor from afar. The letter quickly moves from the attraction and repulsion the civet symbolizes, a binary extended to the Woolfs themselves—Leonard disgusted, Virginia self-admiring—to a frank admission of prudery. Without encouragement, Woolf has been too embarrassed to partake in the modern-day marketplace of femininity, one defined by store-bought sanitary towels and cosmetics.2 Exchanges social and financial liberate: according to Hermione Lee, Woolf felt incompetent at assessing trends in women’s fashion; her admiration for Hutchinson’s elegant taste, coupled with Hutchinson’s willingness to school her in postwar fashion, [End Page 141] allowed Woolf to consume new styles and toiletries with confidence.3 But ultimately, the social exchange obligates. Hutchinson’s hospitality turns Woolf into “slave, suppliant, servant, debtor” in perpetuity. A jesting tone presides over this letter, but a crucial combination of economies, encompassing the domestic, bodily, and social emerges here, one challenged by nods to abjection yet nevertheless driven by the terms of the marketplace. Scarcity prevails, whetting demand: at the outset of her letter, Woolf lacks paper; by its end, she lacks the resources to repay her social debt. Woolf acknowledges, then curtails, the freedom from economies that socializing promises; this self-same circumscribed promise recurs in her writings, autobiographical and fictional alike. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Virginia Woolf engagement diary, 1933. Originally, “economy” referred to the management and administration of resources within households; its meaning was extended to communities and other organized bodies, including the self. Sparingness, frugality, and saving are also implied. The Woolfs generated a robust domestic economy, one that encompassed not only the relentless monitoring of their home-based employment and expenditure, but also socializing and [End Page 142] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Virginia Woolf engagement diary, 1939. their health. These economies are foregrounded in Leonard’s and Virginia’s engagement or pocket diaries, which tersely and provocatively tabulate the intermingling and maintenance of work, friendships, and selves. Leonard’s diaries were archived at the University of Sussex in 1973 and include one 1898 volume and desk or engagement diaries for every year from 1910 until his death in 1969. Virginia’s longhand diaries have been in print since the late seventies, but her pocket diaries entered the public domain for the first time in 2013, when they were purchased by the University of Sussex’s Special Collections.4 The years 1930, 1933, 1935–37, and 1939–41 are preserved. When she edited The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell had recourse to the pocket diaries, but they continue to offer information unavailable within that well-plumbed, five-volume publication. Some of this information falls under the category of sheer haptic pleasure: the 1933 diary is one of two that houses its original pencil, and its elastic closure is stretched to uselessness; stamped “L. W.,” it is likely a Leonard cast-off (fig. 1).5 Stylistic information emerges also: Virginia customized three diaries, [End Page 143] gluing overlays of roughly cut morocco leather to the original covers in 1937 and 1940 and adding a green binding to her...

Spectacle and Surveillance in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames

The department store at the centre of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames is an environment defined by scopic extravagance. All women seem to invite the speculative gaze of Mouret and his male managerial staff, who view the clerks and customers from afar in order to survey present conditions and plan future projects within the store. What resembles freedom in Mouret’s empire of female pleasure is thus really a form of containment all the more dangerous for being so imperceptible. Considering the changes to the department store implemented by the provincial shop girl Denise, this paper argues that she disrupts these systems of surveillance and introduces new ways of looking. Workers are thus protected, rather than policed, by the paternalistic management and shoppers are encouraged to look around them without fear of how they are being viewed.

‘Clothes make an awful difference in a girl’: Mlle. Modiste, Irene and Funny Face as Cinderella fashion musicals

Abstract The world of fashion has been a frequent setting for the many Broadway musicals inspired by Charles Perrault’s Cinderella (1697). Using two Broadway musicals and one Hollywood musical as cross-historical case studies, this article examines how the American musical has variously adapted and interpreted themes of ‘clothes make the woman’ by posing Cinderella as a shop girl or model in fields of consumer fashion. The 1905 Victor Herbert/Henry Blossom operetta Mlle. Modiste, and the 1919 Cinderella musical Irene (by James Montgomery, Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy) both assert the democratizing power of fashion. In Mlle. Modiste, the resourceful title character uses both her singing talent and her access to stylish clothing to rise in the world as an opera diva, as well as a viscount’s wife. Irene emphasizes themes of masquerade and meritocracy, as the eponymous Irish American shop girl models dresses for couturier ‘Madame Lucy’, fools high society as a pedigreed lady and marries her Prince Charming. By contrast, the 1957 Paramount movie musical Funny Face problematizes its heroine’s fashion-world makeover. While Funny Face’s narrative depicts the transformation of Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a bookish ‘Greenwich Village Cinderella’, into a glamorous Paris mannequin, Funny Face’s musical numbers, use strategies of camp and parody to undercut the concept of ‘The Quality Woman’.

Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920. By David Huyssen (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 378 pp. $39.95

Progressive Inequality is an important, a deeply researched, and an altogether impressive examination of interclass contact and relations in New York City between 1890 and 1920. It is not a new topic; the 1970s saw a cycle of such studies. But this work revises the topic significantly, advancing well beyond the “social control” arguments of that scholarship. Huyssen reveals the elitist disdain at the nexus of the charitable relation, blind and unaware though it be. This cultural history is attentive to language as well as to “robust, often unilateral exercises of power” (16). Huyssen favors a “cooperative” spirit linking the classes, and he is particularly harsh, sometimes even contemptuous, of the language and politics of the leading philanthropists of the 1890s.In the second half of the book, which purports to engage givers who have a better sense of the poor and understand themselves better than their predecessors did, Huyssen makes a category error by eliding Gilded Age reformers and actual Progressives. He misses a generational shift. Those whom he criticizes—Robert W. DeForest, Richard Gilder, and Josephine Shaw Lowell—were all born in the 1840s, whereas the later reformers whom he sees in a more positive light—Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, and Mary Simkovitch—were born in the 1860s; Mary E. Dreier was born in 1875. Hence, the philanthropies of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era ought to be distinguished, even though his conclusion notes that neither was democratic in a cultural or political sense.Yet generation is not destiny. Regrettably, Huyssen declines to follow Lowell into the Progressive Era, when she began to condemn manufacturers and middle-class consumers for exploiting the poor. The later Lowell was moved by the Haymarket riot, the Homestead strike, and the Henry George campaign for mayor in New York to bring together poor women (“shop girls”) and middle-class women (consumers) in the National Consumer League to collaborate in the name of justice rather than charity: What the “poor want is fair wages and not little doles of food.”1Huyssen admires Wald’s settlement house work, as well as Jacob Schiff’s support of it, adding, however, that Wald’s aid to the poor unavoidably “reflected, rather than subverted, the inequality upon which it rested” (183). The early parts of the book are prosecutorial in tone, whereas the latter chapters are marked by restrained celebration. The alliance of women with money (notably Alva Belmont) and women without money (the seamstresses and various union leaders) become Huyssen’s focus. The great shirtwaist strike of 1909/10 ended inconclusively; a year later, the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire followed. By that time, interclass mobilization was coming apart.The book ends on that sad note; indeed, the poor, the vulnerable, and the exploited are still with us. Yet the tragedy that paralyzed one generation of New Yorkers mobilized another one—Al Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and Frances Perkins—who brought the state into play in a way that strengthened labor, thus tilting the polity toward more justice, though still not enough.

EVELYN SHARP'S WORKING WOMEN AND THE DILEMMA OF URBAN ROMANCE

In the 1890s, London teemed with opportunities for people in search of a vocation. For some women, urban London became a location wherein one could unburden oneself from the limitations of home life. However, Evelyn Sharp's short stories contributed to a strain of New Woman fiction that investigated the personal costs of the adoption of a profession. To choose a career did not simply change what a woman did with her time; it altered her identity. The classed bodies of career women were often identified and read through the occupations they practiced. When Evelyn Sharp's heroines masquerade as a shop girl and an artist's model in order to free themselves from bourgeois social norms, the way men respond exposes how expectations regarding gender and class status continue to constrict their professional and personal choices. “In Dull Brown” and “The Other Anna”, published in the controversial periodical the Yellow Book, dramatize the plight of New Women who desire socio-economic independence as well as equality in their personal relationships. Despite the increased liberty garnered when one adopts a career, these women ultimately discover that their professional personas permit only a limited sense of freedom.

Imagining the flâneur as a woman

Flânerie as an activity of strolling and looking carried out by the flâneur is a persistent motif in literature, sociology and art concerned with urban and specifically metropolitan culture. During the 19th century the flâneur was conceptualised as exclusively male, since women were not able to walk around the city with the same freedom as men. Women were firmly entrenched in the domestic sphere and it was only lower-and working-class women who entered the masculine public sphere on a regular basis (Wolff 1990, 35). Therefore, the experience of the city stroller of the modernist era was mainly attributed to the male and the idea of the female flâneur was inconceivable. In this article the flâneur is imagined as a woman – a radical shift from the 19th-century conception of the flâneur who merely consorted with prostitutes and shop girls, never seeing them as equals or as having a rightful ‘place’ in the public arena of the city. The concept of the flâneuse is investigated to ascertain the possibility of her existence and presence in the city. The article thus questions the gender of the flâneur and suggests that the flâneuse does not have the same freedom to stroll the streets as her male counterpart as a result of the intricate connection women have with consumerism, specifically by being an object as well as a subject of consumerism. On this account women's position in consumer society is explored from the position of the prostitute and being the object of male gaze and desire. Reference is made to selected artworks by the South African artists Tracy Payne, Celia de Villiers and Dineo Bopape to elucidate theoretical concepts brought forward in the article.

Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916 (review)

Reviewed by: Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916 Shannon Scott Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916, by Stephanie Rains, pp. 226. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. $74.95. Stephanie Rains’s examination of commodity culture in nineteenth-century Dublin addresses a blind spot in studies of nineteenth-century consumerism, which tend to focus primarily on the growth of commodity culture in England, continental Europe, and America. Rains focuses instead on Dublin’s growing middle class in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and examines the social history of Dublin through the lens and trends of consumer culture. She organizes [End Page 154] the evidence chronologically, with each of the five chapters exploring the evolution of Dublin’s middle classes through the expansion of department stores, mass transit, and suburban areas. The book aims to correct the misconception that there was no thriving middle class in nineteenth-century Dublin. Rains convincingly illustrates how, week after week, Dubliners flocked in increasing numbers to department stores. Some of these “temples to consumerism” still remain in twenty-first century Dublin—for example, Arnott’s on Henry Street and Clery’s on O’Connell Street (formerly Sackville Street). Rains begins with a careful examination of the controversial transition in commodity culture from small shops to “monster houses,” or department stores, in the 1850s. Small family-run shops, which had dominated in the previous half century, accused emerging department stores of monopolizing, undercutting prices, and generally squeezing them out of business. As a result, shop owners formed the Dublin Traders’ Association to protect their interests while owners of such “monster houses,” as Pim Brothers and Company, and McSwiney, Delaney and Company, scrambled for more space to meet consumer demand. Rains points out the key differences between “monster houses” and small shops that made the former more attractive to the consumer. Unlike small shops, department stores displayed their prices; shoppers knew immediately if they could or could not afford an item without having to ask or haggle. She argues that middle-class suburban women in particular embraced this new type of shopping experience, although they also complained about having to buy crinoline frames and other personal items from “strapping fellows”—a trend that would change with the employment of “shop girls” in the 1860s. Furthermore, department stores, unlike the smaller establishments, paid their workers better wages, housed them in dormitories on company property, and dangled possibilities for professional advancement. The second and third chapters consider the expansion of mass transit in the 1860s and 1870s as a major contributor to the growth of department stores. In many ways, Rains’s study of commodity culture is also a study of Dublin’s mass transit system. As Dublin Tramways Company expanded into the suburbs, allowing workers and shoppers to travel to the city center and back, department stores grew dramatically—Arnott and Company bought and redecorated more space while Pim Brothers began offering delivery services. Later in the nineteenth century, as trams multiplied and fares grew cheaper, overcrowding became an issue and tensions arose between female shoppers and workers commuting to Dublin from the suburbs. An editorial in the Irish Times in 1887 titled “A Hint to the Ladies” complains about exhausted workers being expected to give up their seats to female shoppers with bulky parcels—a gallant but fatiguing gesture. [End Page 155] As Rains studies the development of commodity culture in Dublin, she also charts the emerging association between women and consumerism—the transformation of department stores into gendered spaces, and shopping into a woman’s activity. Rains reveals how middle-class women in suburban Dublin purchased more luxury items, specifically clothing and home décor, due to the low cost of housing rent, which took on average ten to twenty percent of a family’s annual income. In response to their buying power, the department stores stocked products to meet the demands of middle-class women, chiefly fashions and furnishings, both imported and homemade. Women’s participation in commodity culture also facilitated the creation of a more recreational shopping experience, leading to the opening of tea rooms and restaurants within department stores...

Pasadena, 1901

Pasadena, 1901 Erin McGraw (bio) No one could tell me a thing. Eighteen years old, I had goals as clear in my mind as fence posts—although fence posts were exactly what I wanted never to think about again. Yearning could undo a person, so I shut my mind tight against memories that shimmered like heat mirages—tricks of light and wind. I did not let myself think of old times, old voices, a life left blinking in surprise when I stepped onto a train and escaped. Pa used to say that since we weren't rich in cash or land, we were rich in common sense. I used it, and got out of Kansas. And truly, leaving behind the wind and the blank heat and the depthless prairie was easy. Slipping away from Jack, my husband—God knows, easier still. The difficulty came after I arrived in Los Angeles, only stopping there because I couldn't go any farther. Like the other girls who poured into the downtown Arcade Station from Missouri and Texas and Ohio, I found work as a shop girl, bringing home six dollars a week. Four of those dollars allowed me a room in a gas-lit firetrap, sticky with heat and loud as a switching yard, where many of the lodgers were single women whose doors opened directly to the street. They passed me in the corridor without speaking, the greasy cotton of their wrappers swishing unpleasantly. Sometimes they grinned when I drew back. If I lived on oranges and tap water, I could save six dollars a month. Six dollars wasn't enough to buy me a fine pair of shoes, much less a decent address. I looked in bleak hatred at Levant's, the dim department store where I stood every day, selling gloves and collars. The [End Page 120] customers who populated my imagination with such bright elegance did not come to a dark downtown street where the garbage and horse droppings were banked at the curb. The ladies did not care to bring their custom to a store without display counters or electric lights. The ladies shopped where they lived: in Pasadena. I knew nothing about Pasadena, but the other shoppies talked about it, especially on the weekends, when we drank beer and were apt to say things. Streets in Pasadena were boulevards, expanses forty feet across. On either side, mansions spread out behind trellises and fountains with statues. "It's filled with money," my friend Josephine said, as if the point required plain statement. "That's where money goes to live." We were sitting at a dance hall, half-shouting over the noise and our beers. The room, a big wooden shell with only a rough platform for the ragtime orchestra but an enormous dance floor filled with jiggling dancers, was ripe with the smell of damp, eager bodies. Josephine's sister Mabel was sitting on the lap of a fellow whose name we were never told, and a girl named Mathilda kept getting up and sitting down, getting up and sitting down. She banged into the small table and beer was slopping everywhere, but no one complained. When a fellow with a wide moustache came over and asked me where I lived, I said, "Pasadena." "No, you don't." He grinned. "I do, though. Go there and look for me." "I'm looking at you now. And I don't want to stop looking." Then the other girls hooted, all right. "There's your Two-Dollar Bill," Mabel said. What right had she, sprawled on her fellow's lap? Anybody could see how she was hoping that night would end. She was bound to be disappointed; already the fellow was looking for a way to dislodge her. To my boy with the moustache I said, "Prove to me you're a gentleman." "Can't do 'er. Sorry." "Then prove to me I shouldn't call the cops on you." [End Page 121] "Here?" He gestured at the unpainted wood walls, the shirt-sleeve orchestra at the far end, the dance floor jammed with tipsy, roaring couples. Like everything else in my life now, the racket—you couldn't...