When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion

The role of women in the national consciousness changed drastically several times throughout the 20th century as the American economy fluctuated. Satow’s history of the fashion industry suggests the fluctuation of women’s rights as a similar a kind of sociocultural pendulum in which periods of growth for women’s rights were followed by backlashes throughout the 20th century.

In the early 1920s, women achieved significant progress in the fight to expand their freedom, access, and influence in society. When Dorothy Shaver came to New York City in 1918, she took her place as one of “a new female archetype, the flapper [who] was emerging in the national consciousness” (35). This new woman was “glamorous, sexually uninhibited, and financially independent” and “represented previously unimaginable freedoms for young women” (35). The emphasis on sexual and financial freedom in this passage highlights how men had previously held financial control, reifying the patriarchal structures that prescribed women’s sexual roles throughout history. Satow’s emphasis on glamor reflects her argument that “changing national attitudes towards female workers were reflected in miniature in the department stores” throughout the 20th century (53). As post-World War I prosperity brought on the golden age of department stores, the retail industry became a space where single young women like Dorothy Shaver were able to build independent lives.