History of Typical Women Shopping in Departmental Stores in the 1880s
America is a land of possibilities. There are dreams in the advent of a new culture that was angling to change the way of life in the late nineteenth century. Their men considered the women in America’s preceding time as belonging to the homestead to do house chores, bear and care for the children, and tending to their husbands ensuring hospitality. Past studies portray nineteenth-century American women as middle-class sex objects, emotional, dependent on men, and deeply religious. Women’s roles were cooking, serving food, cleaning the home, and even sewing. They were not allowed to leave the house or home often for work while the girls could not go to school. They would wear long dresses that were big, making it difficult for them to venture into recreation activities such as sports. There were no sports for women in the maiden Olympics in Athens in 1886, and only tennis and golf would women involve. The wearing of trousers was forbidden in those days, as depicted in Image 1 below.
Furthermore, politics for women was against the land rules, and they would not even vote. Women from the poor background were engaged as servants as elaborated in the Little Women’s March family, who worked as governesses as the only job for women (Leach, 1984).
The American civil war of 1861-1865 brought changes in the way people would view women. Women were needed in hospitals to tend to the injured, and men began to see women’s importance. These activities were the genesis of the change women required. Many women now ventured into other jobs and the workforce, such as service industries and consumer-based shopping. The paradigm shift became massive, influencing even the existing culture of consumption, which transformed the women.
Women’s cultural transformation guided them to change their conception of capitalism with women’s freedom of choice by women and intense manipulation with utopia. The status of importance is the impact of consumer culture on working women in powerful consumer establishments and the middle-class who shop while mostly based in the institutions emerging. However, overcoming women’s exploitation and discrimination is partly due to men’s dominance in managerial positions, higher wages, and women’s exploitation in the consumer firms (Laermans, 1993). The consumer life pattern demonstrates the freedom that individuals deprived women of repression, self-denial, and potential work rewarding and expression. (Passive voice) Poor women bore the brunt of the inability to access the luxury that the shopping department store had to offer.
The first American department store was the Arnold Constable store founded in 1825, a dry goods store on pine street in New York, which moved into a five-story Marble House in 1857. In 1876, Wanamaker’s Grand Depot was opened in Philadelphia, about seventy thousand people turned up, chiefly women. The store built by gaslights had essentially contained fabrics, fur, and gloves. Someone played an enormous pipe organ on an opening day. ( Passive voice, Please rewrite) Attendants, carefully dressed with an inside lounge of 1100 seats. It was to have a conversation with one another about their purchases as an offer during the shopping. This new concept was one kind of experience of freedom offered(Passive in a departmental store. ( Wordy sentence)
For upper and middle-class women, the departmental store represented a new opportunity in the 19th century. These were the first urban spaces that offered protection to women without men around them other than their homes with their luxuries. These culture and consumption changes inspired women to be powerful. The department stores continued to launch due to the market demand, expansion of the transport system, and capital concentration among people, which varied with the initial dry goods houses managed by Protestant merchants. By the the1890s the stores had become a colossal urban store.
As intimated by W. F. Hotchkin, an advertising manager at John Wanamaker’s store, decorators “transfigured” and “transposed” the stores, as well as the goods into “pictures,” impress the customers. The store did psychologically and physically occupy the urban space following the revolution, through the departmental stores aimed at watering down any form of resistance to those not utilized to this form of trading and usurping smaller successful retail establishments prevalent in the street culture that compete for the urban space.
Department stores employed light, glass, and color technologies as a modern institution, as depicted by Image 5 below (Laermans, 1993). Harry Gordon Selfridge and Rowland Hussey Macy assured women that shopping in the department stores would not harm their reputation. The store had comfortable private dressing rooms, lounge chairs, furnishings like luxurious carpets, and homelike. (PLEASE REPHRASE) Other prominent features included staff made up mostly of women; fixed prices made the place look like an extension of the home, haggling was not warranted(passive voice) for women. In the stores’ security guards staff, in the words of owner Edward Filene made it feel like “Adam-less Eden.”
The homelike atmosphere made women want to linger around more; thus, the retailers responded by plush extension of their homes upon realizing the impact of the departmental stores on women. For instance, an Emporium in San Francisco contained a nursery, post office, library, an emergency room, and a beauty parlor. As a strategy, there were separate smoking rooms, multiple places to take tea or dine featured, a full-fledged information bureau, and a joint meant for men to enjoy. These would serve to reassure women’s safety around men without feeling threatened. Women would, therefore, be inspired by these measures that became popular for them to go shopping. Other features in departmental stores in retail establishments were displays that rotate, glass windows with a big plate that brought about the window shopping concept that eventually let women free to be on the street. Restaurants soon realized the potential customers out of the women who went window shopping on the streets after it suddenly became socially acceptable for women to go out on the roads (Swiencicki, 1998).
The departmental stores have revolutionized the shopping way while women have transformed into their character and way of life since the 19th century. (Needs more development Doesn’t conclude anything.)