"The Rest Can Go to the Devil": Macy's Workers Negotiate Gender, Sex, and Class in the Progressive Era

This article uses the records of a 1913 moral reform investigation of Macy's Department Store to demonstrate that workingwomen, social reformers, and employers governed themselves and others through intertwined practices and norms of labor, gender, and sexuality. Analysis of these records reveals that workingwomen were important actors in the constitution of these dynamics. The negotiation of what was deemed proper in relation to gender and sex was central to techniques of capitalist management and bourgeois social reform, and also to the work and leisure cultures of Macy's female employees. Examining these negotiations of propriety in a New York department store enriches our comprehension of women as desiring and laboring agents. It also documents how women's cultures of work and leisure hindered feminist and class alliances and directed women's energies into forms of individualism, as well as social hierarchy and regulation, which were conducive to newly developing dynamics of consumerism and heteronormativity.