A Shoppers Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown [Hardcover]

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time Americas downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in womens rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district.

After the citys Great Fire, Chicagos downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these womens conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men.

A Shoppers Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established womens new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

As suburban shopping malls and more recently e-commerce eclipse commercial downtowns, the department stores and theaters that once anchored them are disappearing. Remuss wonderful book has much to teach us about the past, present, and future of downtown. Not only did rising consumption reshape the built environment of central cities in the late nineteenth century, but so too did battles over who belongedor did notin this new public space. As the metropolitan landscape shifts again today, Remuss fascinating insighló!