A Shoppers' Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown by Emily Remus (review)

Emily Remus charts a pivotal moment in late nineteenth-century American consumer history by focusing on episodes of conflict between elite and middling Chicago women and male counterparts accustomed to ruling downtown. According to Remus, these "moneyed" ladies tested assumptions of masculine primacy in urban public spaces by challenging accepted standards of comportment. Combining legal case studies with well-chosen material and cultural details, Remus highlights lived experiences as well as the real political effects of the growing presence of women on public transportation, in city streets, and at retail centers.

Remus justifies her focus on Chicago with balanced claims of typicality (other large cities faced similar rates of growth and expansion) and exceptionalism ("established urban centers" did not offer the same levels of "social openness") (5). Remus crafts an insular narrative, wherein her main sources of comparison are the aspirations of city builders—as ambitious dry goods moguls strived to turn marshy State Street into a posh boulevard à la Paris's Champs-Élysées (23). This admittedly narrow geographical take, however, does afford the book opportunities for lush, cinematic descriptions of urban landscapes. Readers are led by a graphic sense of navigating the dangerously uneven, refuse-scattered streets and the crowded, clanging streetcars leading to the clean and electrified retail "houses."

The chosen case studies are topically diverse but underassessed, beginning with widespread concern over the potential return of capacious hoopskirt fashions and ending with the very practical issue of rush-hour pedestrian traffic. Though a critic of the book calls debates over hoopskirts and elaborate hats "small historical beer" into which the author "must digress,"¹ Remus's recognition of the well-established historical importance of fashion to the gendered history of urban public spaces and broad economic and political developments serves her purpose more eloquently than would a rehashing of saloon laws, department store growth, or sidewalk peddling regulations (though I admit wanting the latter, especially, discussed at times). As Nan Enstad and Kathy Peiss established more than twenty years ago, fashion in turn-of-the-century American cities strongly influenced social identities, public perceptions, and political values.² Notably, Remus focuses on case studies intimate to the ladies' persons: worn clothing, imbibed alcohol, and reviled seducers.

The risk in basing a 2019 monograph on an argument that historians must take women and gender into full account to "understand the evolution of our modern consumer economy and the institutions and environment that support it" (8) lies more in providing new material for this reliably proven claim than in justifying a consideration of clothing, which is both a public skin and a consumer product. While Remus's thesis about the dynamics of power and pleasure is not a dramatic intervention into scholarly claims about turn-of-the-century women and their consumer influence, her key point is one of scope. The evolving questions surrounding gender, she argues, are more than notable; they are "crucial" to the development of Chicago's downtown (8). While the legal propositions and the satirical cultural references to women's hats, skirt, and habits of alcohol consumption were mostly male productions, it was women's actions that generated and perpetuated the debates. While the anxieties over the possible resurgence of wide crinolines may have never materialized into an actual fashion crisis, the debates support her assertion that women's persistent presence and preferences in downtown Chicago were determinative of later urban plans.

A Shoppers' Paradise includes an obscure cast of central characters as "moneyed women" (9). For example, the book gives attention to Frances Glessner, a teacher-turned-lawyer's-wife, and her diary. Remus stops short of suggesting that the civic self-identities of moneyed women such as Glessner influenced their consumer actions. Remus uses Glessner's membership to organizations such as the Chicago Woman's Club to...