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IN THIS DIARY ENTRY Annie Haskell describes the rounds of errands she made on one ordinary day. The desire to exchange a pair of rubber gloves and an appointment at an insurance agency became the basis for a trip (probably on public transportation ), a meal out, and visits to a number of other stores. For Annie, as for other women at the turn of the century, the most common reason to go out in public was to run errands, especially errands that involved shopping. The daily job of managing a household, which included feeding, clothing, and looking after the health of all the members of a family, required shopping for food and clothing, going to banks and other offices to conduct household-related business, and visiting doctors and dentists, both alone and with other family members. In addition, women were responsible for maintaining and expressing their family’s status in an increasingly anonymous world, something they accomplished primarily through consumption,as ThorsteinVeblen noted as early as 1899.1 Errands created a regular 25 TWO ERRANDS Met Helen at 18th & Castro and we went down town. She had some errands to do, and I trailed around in her wake. Then went to the Owl, to show them my rubber gloves. After much time and argument they offered me another pair at half price. I said I wouldn’t do it, so they gave me another pair. Then I left Helen and rushed to Hale’s, where Kate was waiting for me. She had a turban she had made for me—with much pains and I wore that. We lunched at the Tivoli Café, then went to the Penn. Ins. where she arranged to have the policy made over to me—after her. —Annie Haskell, August 24, 1914 public presence for women in a web of interlocking landscapes that spread across most of the city. These landscapes combined the streets and public transportation discussed in chapter 1 with the interior spaces of stores, quasi-public spaces that were accessible to the public in general but were controlled by shopkeepers, constraining both women’s access to them and their behavior within them. Different sorts of errands, the women who did them, and the landscapes in which they took place were imagined quite distinctly.In this chapter I examine how three major landscapes of errands—downtown shopping districts, grocery stores, and local main streets—were imagined, built, and experienced, focusing on the tensions between the imagined and built landscapes. Women used their experiences of these landscapes to negotiate the discrepancies between how shopping was imagined and the spaces in which it took place. These experiences, however, were radically different for women of different class positions,as were their relationships to the imagined and built landscapes. In part, these three different landscapes each served a different class of women. Equally important, women of different class positions also had divergent experiences of many of the same landscapes,particularly the downtown shopping landscape. The private control over spaces of shopping meant that only upper-class women could experience them as if they were fully public. Ultimately, these varied experiences helped to construct and reinforce class differences that fostered different relationships between each class of women and the city. The Department Store and the Downtown Shopping Landscape In the turn-of-the-century city the department store emerged as a major venue for the newly feminized activity of shopping. A particularly modern space, the department store was a central agent of change, helping to create modern consumer culture and its focus on spectacle, as well as functioning as a location for the rationalization of selling as an industry.2 More important,the department store focused on women as consumers, making women an important new presence in the city.3 Through its use of display windows, it also helped to create the possibility of a female flaneur. The flaneur, seen by many theorists as the quintessential modern urban figure, roamed the city, observing people and activities and deriving pleasure from the crowd, without being noticed.4 While acting the role of the flaneur has been understood as a male prerogative, recent scholars have argued that women were able to become female flaneurs by walking the city alone, observing , in the role of a shopper.5 As we have seen in chapter 1, women’s presence as window shoppers helped to change the norms of sidewalk etiquette, allowing them to...

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