Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940The luxurious appearance and handsome profits of American department stores from 1890 to 1940 masked a three-way struggle among saleswomen, managers, and customers for control of the selling floor. Counter Cultures explores the complex nature and contradictions of the conflict in an arena where class, gender, and the emerging culture of consumption all came together. "Counter Cultures is a path-breaking and imaginative social history. Benson has made an original and sophisticated contribution to the study of the work process in the service sector." -- Journal of American History "Counter Cultures advances our understanding of the history of women and work, and it does so in an engaging way that should command the attention not only of historians but of a general readership as well." -- Women's Review of Books |
Contents
The New Kind of Store 185090 | 12 |
A Homogeneous Business Organizing the Department Store | 31 |
Managing DepartmentStore Space | 38 |
Taming the Buyer through Functional Organization | 48 |
Blueprints for Buying | 62 |
An Adamless Eden Managing DepartmentStore Customers | 75 |
The Lure of Service | 82 |
The Perils of Service | 91 |
The Individual Career | 189 |
Range and Hierarchy | 190 |
Hidden Costs and Hidden Benefits | 193 |
Short Weekdays Long Saturdays and Unpaid Overtime | 196 |
Age and DepartmentStore Women | 200 |
Marital Status | 203 |
Home Life Ethnicity and Race | 206 |
The Subjective the Exceptional and the Fictional | 210 |
The Powers of Persuasion | 101 |
Made Not Born From the Shopgirl to the Skilled Saleswoman | 124 |
Class Gender and Selling | 128 |
Pressures from Within and Without | 131 |
Welfare Work | 142 |
The Varieties and Scope of Training Programs | 147 |
The Contradictions in Training | 153 |
Incentives for Skilled Selling | 159 |
The Cinderella of Occupations DepartmentStore Saleswomen and the World of Womens Work | 177 |
Snapshots | 182 |
Department Stores TwoTrack System | 184 |
Earnings Employment and Economic Crisis | 187 |
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Common terms and phrases
advertising American BNRDGA Boston Bull buyers buying clerks consumer cost counter customers demand Department of Labor department stores department-store managers department-store selling DGC & FGR dress Dry Goods Economist earnings Echo efforts Elizabeth Beardsley Butler employees fashion female Filene Filene's firm gender Girls Harry Braverman Hortense Odlum Hower Industries John Wanamaker Jordan Marsh July June less Lord & Taylor M.A. thesis Macy's manufacturing married Marshall Field Mary ment stores Mercantile merchandise percent personnel policies problems profits purchases Report salary sales force salespeople salesperson saleswomen saleswomen's work culture selling floor selling skill Sept shopgirl shoppers skilled selling social store managers style System tion tomers trade U.S. Congress U.S. Department wage Wage-Earning Women Wanamaker's Washington Wide-Awake Retailing woman Women in Stores women workers Women's Bureau writer York
Popular passages
Page 10 - The Female World of Love and Ritual : Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no.