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  • Shopgirl, 1880–1920
  • Maureen Moran
Lise Shapiro Sanders. Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880–1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. xii + 279 pp. $44.95

"I was that lowest form of animal life, a junior to wait on the seniors and hopefully learn salesmanship," recorded a hard-pressed shopgirl employed by the large London department store, Selfridges, in 1909. In contrast, the shop assistants in the 1909 musical comedy, Our Miss Gibbs, specialize in frivolity, fun and sexual license on their days off. They happily warble of their intentions to "[f]rolic and flirt and spoon / Without an intermission— / Ride on the cars, pay at the bars, / At the Exhibition." The poignant dissimilarity between the exploitative lived experience of late-Victorian and Edwardian female shopworkers and their glamorous fictionalised equivalents whose lives are [End Page 463] transformed by marrying the boss forms the basis for this fascinating study. In the course of her complex monograph, Lise Shapiro Sanders delves into a number of cultural fields: mass entertainment and the burgeoning leisure industry, romantic fiction for female readerships, employment relations and new "scientific" managerial theories at the turn of the century, modern consumer culture, and the realities of everyday life for working women in urban retail outlets. She argues that the fin-de-siècle shopgirl constructed in the cultural imagination drew together these diverse domains. As seller and consumer, desired and desiring subject, and working-class inhabitant of a new middle-class space, the female shop assistant of the period is a transitional and liminal figure. Sanders persuasively suggests that representations of the London shopgirl crystallized contentious debates about new labour and leisure practices. Moreover, they served as an important repository of cultural anxieties about female class boundaries, gender respectability, and sexual propriety. At the same time, Sanders also demonstrates that the handling of the shopgirl figure by sociologists, political activists, imaginative writers and early filmmakers between 1880 and 1920 sheds new light on the genre of popular romance and the workings of modern mass culture.

Drawing on historical accounts, shop records, diaries and autobiographical writing, Sanders begins her investigation with a survey of the real labour conditions of shopworkers. The life for most of these women was wearing and degrading, characterized by hot, heavy uniforms, strict surveillance of behaviour (no sitting or leaning on walls, pillars or the counter), punishing timetables with few breaks (from 8:30 a. m. to 11 p.m. on some days), heavy fines for the most minor infractions, and poor wages often delivered "in truck" (that is, by payment through store goods or the provision of crowded, unhealthy board and lodgings). This exploitative environment drew the ire of conservatives and political reformers alike. Traditionalists pointed to the physical, social and moral dangers faced by these women who had chosen to enter the public working environment instead of assuming a "proper" femininity in domestic obscurity. Trade union officials and socialists used the plight of the shopgirl to exemplify the dehumanising effects of capitalism. Indeed, the first woman cabinet minister in Britain, Margaret Bondfield, had started her career as a shopgirl. Her experiences of shop abuse spurred her to join the Independent Labour Party and campaign to improve conditions for working women. Sanders's deft analysis of Bondfield's short fictions and memoir shows how a minority [End Page 464] of writers could imagine alternative destinies for workers in the new industry of fashion consumerism.

Bondfield was very much the exception, however. Most of Sanders's book is focused on the shopgirl as a figure constructed within and by romance narratives. The rise of the department store—a fantasy site of exotic luxury promising a variety of pleasures—together with the popular subgenre of the shopgirl romance implicated the female shop assistant "within an economy of embodiment and self-display." As a dehumanized agent of the store, she functioned as a kind of living mannequin, modelling a style to be desired and consumed by female purchasers and a body to be possessed by male shoppers. At the same time as she "mediate[d] the sexual and consumer fantasies" of customers, she herself was encouraged to fantasize about her own desires for adornment...

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