Ladies Who Lunched and the Battles They Caused

Much has been written about the rise of Chicago from the flames of the Great Fire. Scholars of the natural and built environment, labor, and capitalism have demonstrated that Chicago represented the new American industrial landscape. A space defined by architectural wonder and endless bounty, where a working man could achieve wealth and fame and escape his lack of pedigree and connections to the old-money families that defined the social and cultural order of the Eastern seaboard. Emily Remus’s A Shoppers’ Paradise offers up another layer to the history of Chicago: wealthy, well-heeled, white women, or “Chicago ladies” as Remus refers to them, “…devoted themselves to bringing order, culture, and beauty to the urban environment – the civilizing a capitalist society” (p. 12).

This is a story of how one very specific group of women occupied downtown Chicago and transformed the space from a city “made of man” dedicated to “industrial production …devoted chiefly to finance, manufacturing, processing, warehousing, and wholesale trade… filled with the institutions and infrastructure that fueled industry” (p. 33). The Chicago Loop was a relatively small area, framed by Lake Michigan to the east, the city’s Levee vice district to the south, mansions to the north, and industrial sprawl to the west. It was made famous by Theodore Dreiser’s fictional account of a young woman who moves from rural Wisconsin to Chicago to find the American Dream in Sister Carrie (1900). Remus uncovers a new perspective on the evolution of Chicago in which the Chicago ladies push the boundaries that defined public and private and, more specifically, “…advance[ed] into public life as both civic actors and consumers…” and how they challenged a patriarchal social and cultural order (p. 7).

A Shoppers’ Paradise is a critical contribution to the literature on the culture of capitalism. It brings a much-needed perspective on “the crucial role of gender” (p. 8). Historian Joyce Appleby commented that the “there can be no capitalism…without a culture of capitalism, and there is no culture of capitalism until the principal forms of traditional society have been challenged and overcome” (p. 8). Remus responds, “Only by taking women and gender into account can historians of capitalism fully understand the evolution of our modern consumer economy and the institutions and environment that support it” (p. 8). A Shoppers’ Paradise is a fascinating examination of that evolution of the culture of capitalism, and Remus excels at exploring the how and why of the challenges.

Remus’s fluid and seemingly effortless writing transports the reader to turn-of-the-twentieth century Chicago as the city flourished after the worldwide success of hosting the World’s Fair. The Loop was a defined area with the elevated train system circling the district and a series of streetcars carrying workers, businessmen, and shoppers back and forth from home to downtown. As retailers such as Marshall Field & Co., Carson Pirie Scott & Co., Mandel Brothers, Charles Gossage & Co., and Schlesinger & Mayer established palaces of commerce, the allure of these high-end retailers garnered attention among the city’s wealthiest families as well as working-class people who came to window-shop or work. In addition to the larger stores, the streets were peppered with smaller specialty shops, tearooms, soda fountains, theaters, and hotels. Eventually, the city’s leading women opened offices downtown for their charitable work, creating even more reason for the Chicago ladies to spend a full day out of the house in the Loop. “The new practices of shopping ladies illuminate how gender ideals constrained and shaped an emergent culture of consumption” (p. 9).

Each chapter explores one way in which the rise of a consumer culture and the subsequent feminization of public space clashed with the decidedly patriarchal culture of Chicago’s Loop district. Remus effectively uses diaries, newspaper coverage, travel writing, and public records to illustrate how disruptive this transformation was for businessmen. As...