“Look for the Moral and Sex Sides of the Problem”: Investigating Jewishness, Desire, and Discipline at Macy’s Department Store, New York City, 1913

Miss Barnett is another Jewess. . . . She also worked for eight dollars and has no pleasures on Sundays or evenings. Spends twenty cents a day in carfares but is unwilling to change to a store nearer home. Has heard terrible stories of how men regard shop-girls, so she is unwilling to work where she may have to wait on men or be in a store where things are “not decent.”

—Faith Habberton

Celia pointed out to me the saleswoman who is on intimate terms with [Mr.] Dringer. . . . She is not fixed up in any way, and I believe her name is Gladys. . . . [Celia told] me that Sadie had been intimate with her young man for about two years. . . . Celia knows the young man, and says that he is sick of Sadie, but of course he will have to marry her.

—Natalie Sonnichsen

Miss Barnett, Celia, Dringer, Gladys, and Sadie were the subjects of an undercover investigation of moral conditions at Macy’s Department Store in 1913.¹ As Miss Barnett hinted, the investigation in fact reflected a moral panic—a significant constellation of social anxiety, debate, and mobilization—that produced “terrible stories” of evil and danger around women’s employment in stores.² The panic around department stores illustrated the tendency of diverse Progressive Era groups to address politics and economics through questions of sexual morality. Hence prostitution and illicit sexuality generally served as a lens through which people analyzed immigration, the corporatization of business, and the perils of urbanization. The Macy’s investigation was the product of broad social alarm and debate around perceived links between workingwomen’s virtue and their wages and working conditions. The contention reflected anxiety about the impact of women’s paid labor on the division of labor and resources within and outside of patriarchal families and about linked shifts in sexual ideas and practices. The unease manifested in contradictory extremes, through the sexualization of women and their workplace vulnerability, on the one hand, and the fear that women’s work desexualized them, on the other.³

The scrutiny of reformers Habberton and Sonnichsen occasioned by the panic around stores facilitates a look into the worlds of Jewish working-women such as Miss Barnett, Celia, Gladys, and Sadie. These women were unaware that they were objects of formal investigation, but their words and actions as conveyed by undercover reports show that they were cognizant of the surveillance attending their virtue as “shop-girls.” In fact, these workingwomen were engaged in monitoring themselves and each other as they defined decency and intimacy. This article uses the records of this 1913 investigation to demonstrate how merchant, reformer, and worker enacted sexual and gender practices and norms in the course of their negotiation of Jewishness and related matters “nearer home,” including immigrant assimilation, the production of racial hierarchies, and intersecting gradations of class and status. Through such negotiations merchant, reformer, and worker participated in the making of modern forms of labor relations and sociability, power and identity, and city life.⁴

The essay thus builds on and links often separate histories of how varied groups performed sex and gender through mundane interaction, how microlevel power relations among Jews and Gentiles intersected with the wider workings of class, assimilation, and racialization, and the function of both the U.S. department store and Progressive Era investigation as realms of social production. The aim is to analyze a local site in a manner that illuminates the early U.S. social history of how people’s agency and loyalties were channeled into hierarchical and often-tenuous forms of individualism, sexual and romantic coupling, and group positioning that characterized the century’s intertwined legacy of heteronormativity, consumer capitalism, and white supremacy.⁵ The article begins with an overview of the Macy’s investigation and outlines the historical and historiographical background of racial formation, then analyzes the investigation’s documentation of Jewish workingwomen, those who sought to investigate them, and the terrain that these actors helped to produce.

The Macy...