Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  It was in this environment that philosophers and critics of art and literature began to talk a great deal about what they called gusto, goût, Geschmack, or “taste.” Theorists like Immanuel Kant claimed that judgments of taste were objective and based on reason. Although the reaction that a given person experienced before an object depended upon the sensations of pleasure or displeasure that that object caused him or her personally, Kant said this appraisal should have “universal validity.” That is, it should hold true for anyone and everyone. In retrospect, the obsession with taste looks a lot like snobbery—a tool for distinguishing people by social class. Taste was a way for an aristocracy with waning political power to assert its superior cultural capital. As the nineteenth century went on, criticizing the bad taste of nouveau riche upstarts became one way for the first members of the middle class to hold their ground.

  “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has observed. Information about class remains useful on the dating market.

  In an age when most of us no longer rely on our families to select partners for us from our own social set, or crow openly about “how many pounds a year” a love interest expects to inherit from his bachelor uncle, inquiring after taste is a way to select someone from the “right” background. Someone who announces a love of opera says that she is wealthy enough to buy opera tickets, or at least sophisticated enough to know about standing room. Accurately pronounce the name of the Bordeaux you order, or linger on your description of its terroir, to show that you know about France or French or at least know enough to drop the final letters.

  A lifetime of socialization causes many of us to send and receive these kinds of signals about class background without thinking about it. A savvy dater can use them to telegraph status. And if you understand these rules of taste well enough, you can manipulate them in order to date up. This is precisely what the first women who dated tried to do.

  * * *

  Women who went to work at department stores, restaurants, and other businesses in the early twentieth century often hoped to snag one of the men they served. Flirting at work was the best chance many of them had at a happy—or at least financially stable—future.

  A gig as a salesgirl or a waitress put a young woman on public display and brought her into contact with countless eligible men every day. If she was lucky, some of them might be rich. Just a decade or so earlier, it would have been nearly impossible for a working-class girl to catch the eye of a millionaire, much less converse with him. Now she could get close enough for long enough to get asked out. Maybe she could even make him fall in love.

  Shortly after moving to New York from Texas and beginning his prolific career writing short fiction, O. Henry published a portrait of “The Secret Life of Shop Girls.” The story appeared in 1906, in a weekly column that he wrote for the New York World Sunday Magazine. It told of two “chums” who “came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around.”

  A short preamble related that Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were “pretty, active, country girls who had ambition to go to the stage.” But both got jobs in service. Instead of memorizing scripts, they spent most of their time studying the kinds of men they would like to date and the kinds of wives who had managed to win them.

  Nancy works as a salesgirl behind the handkerchief counter at a luxurious department store. Her colleagues go on dates, drinking and dining on the dime of “swell gentleman friends,” without compromising their virtue—or at least without revealing that they have. She makes only $8 per week, but she knows that the real value of her position is the visibility it gives her.

  “Look what a chance I got!” she exclaims. “Why, one of our glove girls married a Pittsburg—steel-maker, or blacksmith or something—the other day worth a million dollars.”

  Lou works ironing clothes in a laundry. Although she makes $18.50 her first week, she is less ambitious than Nancy when it comes to courtship. She pokes fun at her friend’s plans to marry a millionaire. But she, too, tries to use her job to meet men. When Lou gets asked out at work, Nancy is skeptical.

  “What show would a girl have in a laundry?” It turns out that there is a coveted position at the front of the laundry where you can get some exposure.

  “He came in for his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board, ironing,” Lou explains. “We all try to get work at the first board.”

  O. Henry was not making this up. Frances Donovan, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist who taught at Calumet High School on the city’s South Side in the 1920s, interviewed senior girls about their plans after graduation.

  “I would like to be a stenographer,” one announced. “I’m going to be an executive secretary and marry the boss.”

  After spending two summers working behind the counter at a Chicago department store as research for her 1929 book The Saleslady, Donovan believed that one of her students could do just as well there.

  “I knew of several marriages and heard of a great many more where the husband was far above the wife as measured by the economic scale,” Donovan reported. About coworkers who managed to make a “fine marriage,” Donovan’s research subjects expressed frank envy. “He’s a millionaire from Kansas City. She has a Packard car and did you notice that sparkler on her left hand? Isn’t she the lucky kid! And you and I go right on workin’.”

  * * *

  The legends of girls in their position who had married rich encouraged many service workers to daydream. The British annual magazine Forget-Me-Not promised to reveal to its readers “How Shop-girls Win Rich Husbands.” Department store managers even got in on the game. Sparks, an in-house newsletter published for employees of Macy’s in New York, regularly summarized selling-floor gossip.

  “Have you noticed a gentleman wearing spats stopping at Miss Holahan’s counter every day, leaving a spray of lily of the valley? Best of luck, Ide!”

  Landing the job was a start. To make the most of her position, however, the Shopgirl had to become a highly informed consumer of the kinds of goods she sold. She learned to read the signals that men sent through the appearances they cultivated and the kinds of things they bought.

  In the O. Henry story, Nancy learns to look for hints about whether her customers are in fact rich. She spies on them as they slip in and out of their automobiles. “A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur!” she scoffs when she sees this dead giveaway. “Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.”

  In addition to scrutinizing customers, women in service positions strove to send the right messages themselves. To do this they studied their female customers—the wealthy housewives they dreamed that they, too, might become if they played their likes right. By dressing tastefully, they aimed to attract the attention of desirable men and to demonstrate that they deserved something better than their current station.

  Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, career advisers tell us today. Shopgirls were the first to realize that it was not where you came from but what you wear that determines how far you can go.

  In an earlier era, a girl from humble origins could not hope to look like the wife or daughter of a millionaire. But a job in a department store or a laundry gave anyone opportunities to become well versed in the signs of wealth. After all, the salesladies and laundresses were the ones selling the handkerchiefs and ironing the cummerbunds that made the rich look rich. A growing number of inexpensive fashion labels offered to help them imitate their customers. So did beauty products.

  The cosmetics industry exploded in the 1920s. Previously, only prostitutes and actresses “painted.” Victorians had viewed “natural” outer beauty as a sign of clean living. But around 1900, more and more women were starting to apply cosmetics. By 1912, The Baltimore Sun reported that even respectable society women “are seen on our streets and fashionable promenade with painted faces.”

  The cosmetics industry inven
ted a new term to free its products from all the negative associations they once had: “makeup.” Not only was “making yourself up” permissible; advertisers were soon claiming it was positively virtuous. By making herself up, a woman showed that she valued her femininity and was willing to spend time and money on her appearance. The results not only made her look pretty. They also demonstrated that she had a good attitude—the kind that her employer, as well as her customers and romantic prospects, wanted.

  Driven by anxiety, as well as romantic ambition, the Shopgirl drove a kind of arms race. The more effectively she sold fashion and beauty culture to her clients, the more mandatory participation in that culture became. It was just what the economy needed.

  * * *

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had become a consumer society. New technologies and labor practices had made shoes and shirtwaists easier than ever to produce. All that was needed was a population who shopped for new shoes and shirtwaists as quickly as factories churned them out.

  In 1925, for the first time, individual consumption of nonessential goods accounted for the majority of the GDP. Economists started to measure growth and health not in terms of manufacturing capacity but rather by the public’s ability, and desire, to buy things. In a market that required consumers to constantly develop new likes for things they did not need, the Shopgirl’s work was essential. While on the clock, she helped others consume. Off the clock, she kept her own consumption up to speed.

  In “The Frog and the Puddle,” a short story that she published in 1912, Edna Ferber described how exhausting it could get. Gertie, the heroine, works at the men’s glove counter at a department store in Chicago. Her manager is particular about hair and fingernails. Gertie quickly learns that “you cannot leave your hair and finger nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a bristle brush and an orangewood stick.” When she returns home to her boardinghouse every night, she is exhausted, but she knows her work is far from over. She must manicure her nails, mend her undergarments, apply cold cream to her face, and brush her hair the regulation one hundred strokes with a bristle brush.

  “The manager won’t stand for any romping curls or hooks-and-eyes that don’t connect,” Gertie explains. “Sometimes I’m so beat that I fall asleep with my brush in the air.”

  * * *

  The Shopgirl who worked tirelessly to maintain her professional appearance was also striving to achieve something that went beyond looks. In The Saleslady, Frances Donovan explained why dress was so important to the colleagues whom she studied: “Without pretty clothes, a girl cannot hope to realize her personality.”

  The idea that your personality might be part of what made you desirable was a new one. In the nineteenth century, Americans had used concepts like “character” and “virtue” to describe themselves. These terms had moral valences. A person revealed her character through kind acts, true friendships, and deeply held convictions. Nineteenth-century advice literature admonished women that when they received gentleman callers, in order to make their best impression, they should wear something dark, modest, and nondescript. They should not let anything superficial distract attention from the soul within.

  “Personality” was different. Personality was something that manifested on your surface. The word comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask. Personality was like “painting”—a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men. Turn-of-the-century psychologists had diagnosed patients with abnormal minds as having “personality disorders.” Starting around 1920, however, experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too. Suddenly, the word was all over the popular press.

  Authors who wrote about romance used it to refer to outward expressions and behaviors. In the context of dating, to have a “good personality” or to simply “have personality” meant to have charisma. This was an asset whether you were selling handkerchiefs or selling yourself. But what exactly it was, was difficult to capture.

  The popular writer Elinor Glyn simply called it “it.” In a two-part short story that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1926, Glyn defined “it” as a mysterious kind of animal magnetism. “With ‘It,’” Glyn wrote, “you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man.”

  The story was adapted into a movie of the same title in the following year. Clara Bow plays a shopgirl who has “it”—and has her eye on her manager, Cyrus. Cyrus is the son of the owner of the department store where Clara works. He will inherit it someday, and Clara is determined to marry him. The “It Girl” uses “it” like a currency, to obtain the best man it can afford her. Yet Glyn insisted that an It Girl was above all effortless.

  “Unselfconsciousness, and self-confidence, and indifference as to whether you’re pleasing or not, and something in you which gives the impression that you’re not at all cold,” she wrote. “That makes ‘it.’”

  This suggested that It could not be learned. But the fact that personality was external meant that you could endeavor to improve it. Between 1910 and 1930, a growing number of books of dating advice promised to tell young women how.

  In 1915, The New York Times reported on a lecture that Susanna Cocroft, the bestselling author of Beauty a Duty, gave at the Astor Theatre in New York. She was promoting her new book, What to Eat and When, but she ended up telling the packed house that “poise” could be more effective than a diet.

  She encouraged her fans to develop poise by studying and mimicking the appearance of fashion models who possessed it.

  “Place a beautiful figure on your wall, and compare that with the lines of your own body,” she instructed. “Express your ideals with your body as in the pictures you express your ideals on your walls.”

  “Beauty is no longer vanity; it is use,” Cocroft said. A waitress or a shopgirl could be fired at any time simply because someone her boss found prettier showed up and asked for her position.

  Nineteenth-century writers on health, hygiene, and etiquette had offered women plenty of wisdom regarding courtship and marriage. But they did not teach strategies for winning and keeping a man by manipulating his emotions. Indeed, they denounced such calculated approaches to romance as coquetry. In the age of personality, however, the experts declared that it was perfectly acceptable—indeed, absolutely necessary—for a woman to work to win a lover. She just had to make it seem effortless. Otherwise she risked committing one of the cardinal sins of the era of taste: She would look like she was trying too hard.

  * * *

  The skills that helped a Shopgirl like Clara Bow in her romantic life also served her well at work. Personality was an asset on the sales floor as well as on the street. Bosses hoped that their employees would inspire desire for what they sold.

  Samuel Reyburn, the president of Lord & Taylor, claimed the Shopgirl could improve her personality simply through her “daily observations of customers in the building.” After spending enough time in the store, “she will lower the tone of her voice, grow quiet in manner, exhibit better taste in the selection of her clothes, become more considerate of others.” Reyburn described this process as if it took place unconsciously, as a matter of course.

  Shopgirls themselves knew better. A Shopgirl knew that the personality she expressed through her likes and her behavior was not something she was born with. Personality consisted of myriad effects that she had to work hard to produce. Anyone who ventures into online dating relearns this lesson. To construct a picture of yourself through photographs and likes and other gestures takes a lot of effort and requires constant tweaking to maintain.

  “A friend, Derek, told me that if I listed Sleeping Beauty among my favorite movies on OkCupid, I would attract creeps and weirdos,” a writer for New York magazine recounted of her own dating profile. “He went on. For instance, to list Gilmore Girls among my favorite TV shows was fine, but I should balance it with something more aggressive, like The Sopranos. My favorite foods should include something savory, not just ‘pie’ and �
�jam.’”

  In O. Henry’s story, Nancy tailors her personality as craftily as she stitches up her knockoff clothes. She studies her customers’ habits, adopting “the best from each.” “From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing ‘inferiors in station.’”

  In Frances Donovan’s Saleslady study, one fellow department store worker described the thrill of using her charisma to sell frocks. “My great joy was to be so nice to them it would put them to shame. Very soon I had them eating out of my hand.”

  The skills that you developed at work made you better at dating, and vice versa. It turned out that selling handkerchiefs and selling yourself required young women to do many of the same things. The most effective women could do both at once.

  In the 1930s, the renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills interviewed dozens of shopgirls as part of the study that would eventually become his book White Collar. The typology he created included the kind of shopgirl he called the “Charmer,” who perfected the art of flirting while selling and selling by flirting.

  “It’s really marvelous what you can do in this world with a streamlined torso and a brilliant smile,” one Charmer told him. “People do things for me, especially men when I give them that slow smile and look up through my lashes. I found that out long ago.”

  It is difficult to tell whether she is talking about picking up a date or attracting a customer—what exactly the “things” she wants from men are. Her desire to be desirable creates a feedback loop. “I spend most of my salary on dresses which accentuate all my good points,” she confesses. “After all, a girl should capitalize on what she has, shouldn’t she? You’ll find the answer in my commission every week.”