Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915

Three: Dining Out

FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY to the early twentieth, dining out became increasingly common for women of all class positions. As women’s roles in the workforce expanded, and as they increasingly went out to shop and for amusement as well as to work, a growing number of institutions served meals away from home to women. For women, eating out was problematic, however. In the late nineteenth century, restaurants were a space primarily for men and for escorted women. Eating in public was considered risqué for unescorted upper- and middleclass women except in a small range of establishments that catered to a female clientele and provided a highly policed and chaste environment. Poorer women like Annie Haskell often ate at restaurants out of necessity, as when they lived in lodgings without cooking facilities, but even in the family restaurants they patronized they needed to guard against contact with strange men.1 By the second decade of the twentieth century, the number of places where women of all classes could eat politely in public had expanded enormously. For the elite women,female-gendered tearooms moved beyond the bounds of the hotel and the department store, providing public places to eat throughout the downtown . Tables for ladies in lunchrooms and the newly invented cafeteria served 67 THREE DINING OUT We have a room at Mrs. Ballou’s—a back room. It runs very small after our big rooms. But it is comfortable and there is a big back porch where the baby can play. I expect this will be a trial for him. We shall of course eat at restaurants. —Annie Haskell, August 31, 1890 working women and shoppers alike in modern spaces free from liquor and the tradition of masculine patronage.2 Establishments aimed at women of varied class positions used a variety of tactics to guard women’s respectability, from borrowing from the domestic sphere in the case of hotel dining rooms and family restaurants to creating new feminine spaces in downtown tearooms and providing new gender-neutral restaurant forms such as the cafeteria. In this chapter I explore the eating establishments patronized by women of all classes and the ways that they were transformed in response to women’s desires for acceptable places to eat out. I begin with recently invented institutions in the late nineteenth century: tearooms, confectioners, and ladies’ dining rooms in hotels, establishments created to serve elite women dining alone. These establishments used two strategies beyond gender segregation to establish themselves as polite feminine spaces: association with the domestic sphere in the case of the ladies’ dining room, and the creation of a new feminine type of restaurant in the case of the tearoom. Ordinary middle-class and working-class women and families were served instead by a wide range of mixed-gender restaurants, including the cafeteria, a twentieth-century gender-neutral invention. Family restaurants followed the model of association with the domestic sphere, and cafeterias used novelty and their relationship with modernity to mark themselves as ungendered, so that they became respectable spaces for women to dine, particularly for lunch. While poorer women searched for respectable restaurants, elite women used the power of their class to patronize the mixed-gender realm of eating for entertainment and thrills in downtown cafés and bohemian restaurants, where the thrill resided in playing with a lack of respectability. Each type of eating establishment and the motives that drew women there created distinctly classed and gendered experiences of public space, ranging from the genteel and protected experience of eating a light meal with other women in a tearoom to the slightly dangerous experience of drinking and dining with a male escort in a bohemian restaurant. The geography of restaurants reinforced the differences among women, with elite women patronizing downtown tearooms and spectacular cafés and poorer women going to homey family restaurants on their local or district main streets. Imagining Feminine Refreshment: Tearooms and Hotels In the nineteenth century, restaurants were primarily spaces for men, in part because they were spaces of drinking as well as eating. The masculinity of restaurants was marked not only by the fact that they served alcohol but also by their design, which often made use of dark wood and leather, and by the male waiters serving the food. Booths that could be closed off with curtains provided space for sexual 68 Dining Out impropriety, further marking most restaurants as inappropriate...