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

In When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, American journalist Julie Satow offers a history of the golden age of American department stores through the lives of three ground-breaking female executives in the mid-20th century. In the 1930s, Hortense Odlum became the first president of a major department store when her husband charged her with revitalizing New York City’s Bonwit Teller. Around the same time, Dorothy Shaver rose through the ranks of Lord & Taylor to become the highest-paid female executive of her day. Later, as the post-war economy boomed, Geraldine Stutz took ownership of Henri Bendel, making her the first female owner of a major department store. Satow weaves these histories with stories of other female retailers to highlight the heavy influence of women in fashion history. Major themes in the book include Changing Roles of Women in 20th Century America, The Benefits of Women in Leadership, and The Mutual Influence of Fashion and Technology.

This summary is based on the 2024 Doubleday eBook edition, and follows Satow’s authorial practice of referring to the principle figures by their first names.

Summary

Since their inception, department stores have been dominated by women. In the early 20th century, they emerged as a space for ambitious and talented women to build independent careers and exert cultural influence. One such woman, Hortense Odlum born in St. George, Utah to a family of early-convert Mormons, longed to leave her rural home for a big city. In 1915, she married Floyd Odlum, an equally ambitious lawyer and moved to New York. Floyd quickly transitioned from law to finance, and his savvy financial decisions prior to the 1929 financial crash made him one of the richest men in America. When he bought the flailing Bonwit Teller department store, he enlisted Hortense to help revitalize it.

Hortense sought to make Bonwit Teller a place where both wealthy women and those on a budget would feel at home. As a result of her efforts, the store’s sales skyrocketed, and Bonwit Teller became one of New York’s most fashionable spots. While Hortense toiled at the store, her husband Floyd conducted a four-year affair with aviator Jackie Cochran. Hortense left Bonwit Teller shortly after her divorce was finalized, and explicitly blamed her career for the end of her marriage. Despite the overwhelming success of Bonwit Teller under her leadership, Hortense bitterly regretted her career, and argued against women in the workplace in the final years of her life. She died in 1970 from complications of dementia.

While Hortense Odlum was revitalizing Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver was building her own career. Dorothy arrived in New York in 1918 at the age of 25 along with her sister Elsie. The girls designed a collection of dolls which was sold at Lord & Taylor. The collection sold out and the sisters declined other merchandising offers to begin their own company. After several years, Dorothy returned to Lord & Taylor, where she quickly rose through the ranks. In 1928, she organized an exhibit of French art deco pieces at the store, cementing her role as a tastemaker.

However, Dorothy soon grew wary of the fashion industry’s reliance on French design and began advocating for American designers in the store. Her efforts to promote a uniquely American style helped to establish the American fashion industry. In 1945, she became president of Lord & Taylor. Her $110,000 salary (the contemporary equivalent of $1.5 million) led Life magazine to name her America’s “No. 1 Career Woman.” Dorothy used her status and platform to argue for civil rights and against post-war conformity. In the 1950s, Dorothy led Lord & Taylor’s expansion into suburban branches and battled the rise of discount stores. Her sudden death in 1959 was mourned by the fashion community and the communities her work supported.

Finally, Geraldine Stutz began her career at Glamour magazine in 1947, buoyed by her innate sense of style and personal experience as a working woman. In 1954, she left Glamour to become one of the highest-paid women in fashion as an executive at a shoe company. Three years later, she was made president of Henri Bendel, a failing department store in New York’s midtown. Geraldine took advantage of Bendel’s small size to make it an exclusive destination for fashionable wealthy women. As the fashion industry transitioned from custom haute couture to ready-to-wear collections in the 1960s, Geraldine and her buyers sourced unique pieces that appealed to the nation’s obsession with youth.

Although her competitors encouraged designers to break exclusivity contracts, Geraldine’s personal connections to New York’s elite and her keen eye for trends made Bendel the heart of fashionable culture in the 1960s and 70s. In 1980, she raised $8 million to buy the store from its parent company, becoming the first female owner of a department store. Five years later, her partners convinced her to sell to Leslie Wexner, the retail giant behind Victoria’s Secret. Wexner’s sexist attitude pushed out many female executives, including Geraldine, who sold her ownership shares in 1986 and never returned to the store. She died in 2005 after a brief battle with cancer.

Woven into the three primary narratives in Satow’s book are interludes focusing on women in department stores outside of New York. In 1905, Maggie Lena Walker founded Richmond’s first department store aimed at Black consumers. After years of harassment from white businesses, she was forced to close in 1912. In 1904, 16-year-old Bessie Harrison began working in a San Francisco department store for $4 a week dusting shelves. Her hard work earned her a role as a saleswoman and then a buyer, so that at the age of 28 she was earning $10,000 per year. In 1925, Elizabeth Hawes worked as a sketcher in a Parisian copy house, a clothing manufacturer that copied high fashion designs. When she was caught sketching at a fashion show, she moved to New York and became an independent designer. Satow notes that Jewish women have long had an important influence on the fashion industry: women like Beatrice Fox Auerbach, Mary Ann Cohen, and Lena Himmelstein overcame multiple marginalized identities as retail executives. In the 1950s, Adel Rootstein used models such as Twiggy and Dianne Brill to develop a series of dynamic mannequins that revolutionized window displays. Bendel buyer Jean Rosenburg held weekly open calls in which designers quickly pitched their merchandise before the store opened, resulting in the discovery of exciting new talent.

In the book’s afterword, Satow argues that, although the age of department stores has been replaced by the era of online shopping, the women depicted in her book would celebrate the democratization of fashion through platforms like Etsy and social media.