When Women Ran Fifth Avenue follows three women during changing times in this country in terms of women in the workforce. While men often owned the buildings and handled upper office matters, it was the women who ran the actual stores. This book features the stories of three women who ran three major department stores in that era, and glimpses into their lives. It was very interesting, both as a born and raised NYer, and someone who shopped in them.

Thank you to the publisher and net galley for this free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is a fascinating look at the women behind the golden age of department stores. I sorely miss shopping at Henri Bendel, Bonwit's and Lord & Taylor so learning about Geraldine, Hortense and Dorothy was a treat. Not only did I discover more about the world of retail but also about the role women played in how the country was changing. Ultimately, it's a story of feminism that even people who aren't into fashion can enjoy and learn from.

Thanks to Doubleday for the copy to review.

When I’m not busy reading - my other job is working at a department store so when I saw this book I was immediately intrigued. While I picked it up for the work connection, I was quickly pulled in by the really interesting stories. I loved learning about three women rising through the ranks at department stores in the 1930s-1960s.

There were some things I didn’t love about the structure of the book and the author’s concluding thoughts - but overall this was a really interesting read. Thank you to the publisher for the free ebook and PRH Audio for the free audiobook.

An inciteful look at the golden age of department stores in NY and Chicago. Men might have owned the buildings, but women ruled the inside. From the creation of teas rooms and beauty salon to advertising and merchandising, the three women portrayed changed the way department store were seen and used. The women took risks, struggled with work life balance and forged new paths for women.

Excellent research. Learning the stories of the stores I used to frequent before they closed their doors forever just makes me appreciate the items I was able to purchase there.

When I first moved to NYC, Lord & Taylor was my go-to. In later years, Henri Bendel became my favorite store. I still carry the handbags I curated from the store.

I appreciate the stores even more now that I know that women were the reason for their success. It's funny how when men took over, trying to dictate what women wanted, the stores ultimately failed.

This book was well researched, and there was so much information. I absolutely loved learning the history of NYC fashion on 5th Avenue.

loved this mystery and keeping secrets and the different point of views. Also loved trying to figure out who did it . I enjoyed the mystery behind it.

I really enjoyed reading this book and I learned a lot. The book focuses on three women who headed three different department stores on Fifth Avenue. The book was well written and the author did a lot of research. The layout however was jumpy, it is not linear. It jumps between the women and there are some asides on other women and stores. I really enjoyed the personal interviews she was able to quote about people who worked with the women. The book also included historical photographs. I found the book easy to read and liked it. Enjoy

Reviewed for wsj https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/when-women-ran-fifth-avenue-review-the-queens-of-fashion-bfe0867f

"I grew up at the tail end of the department-store era, seeing them only as the gloss was rubbing off. There were still uniformed doormen to let you in, and on the walls hung framed photos of glamorous store scenes taken decades earlier: black-and-white images of shoppers in hats and gloves, which only emphasized the downward slide to acrylic sweaters strewn across display tables and dance music piped through the speaker system. Worse were the stores in suburban malls, with their fluorescent lighting and vinyl floor tiles amid the smell drifting in from Cinnabon......"

All these department stores with men's last names hung on their entrances... You would think it was the men who thought about what was best for women who came in for shopping. You would think these men solved the mystery of the "women's brain" to bring their wants, desires, wishes into these stores.... WRONG! of course, it was women thought about all of that.

Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel's made these department stores what they were. Women went there to find answers to their questions, avoid being mocked at, and learn new ways. These women created a union for all women out there. they made fashion accessible and understandable.

Also this about mannequins: 'While Adel's mannequins experienced excitement and glamour, it was often ephemeral. In a profile of Sara Kapp-the mannequin - The New York Times wrote, "She leads a short life, but a luxurious one. Her wardrobe has dozens of designer dresses, marvelous furs and jewels, and she's at home at some of the best addresses in town..... Still, despite her thousands of admirers, she rarely smiles. And no wonder. Her life recently has been fraught with perils: she died of an overdose of pills in Bendel's, was found hanging at Bloomingdale's and had her nose bobbed for the San Francisco Clothing store." Adel retired in 1990 and died in 1992. Before her death, she sold the company that she had founded to a Japanese firm. For many years, it continued to produce noteworthy mannequins under one of Adel's longtime lieutenants, Kevin Arpino, whom The New York Times called "brash and particular" and "a polarizing and powerful figure in the land of plastic people."'

This book is a window into the world of American fashion and the women who helped shape it and the sadly disappearing world of department stores. They're all fascinating women in their own rights, but reading about the work they did in times when women were often overlooked and ignored is downright inspiring. These were women who had to fight the men who constantly denied them their achievements and recognition, yet they still did the work and stood out for doing it incredibly well.

I like how the timelines of all the women are slightly interwoven in a narrative that's non-fiction with a feel of a fictional retelling of how the women came to be leaders of American Fashion. It's not a dry listing of facts, but a human story of women who lived captivating lives.

Delighted thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the enlightening read!

This is a fun history of department stores, the fashion industry in America, and women entering into the business world in the 20th Century.

The author focuses much of the account on three women: Hortense Odlum, Dorothy Shaver, and Geraldine Stutz. Each of these women came from somewhere else, but made their marks in New York City. Along the way, though, she also highlights others who worked in retail or fashion in various capacities – buyers, designers, sketchers, and more.

We’ll start with Hortense, who came and went the quickest. Her husband, Stanley, was a shrewd investor and made millions. More incredibly, he managed to keep most of it through the stock market crash of 1929. One of his acquisitions during this time was a fashion retailer named Bonwit Teller, which was in the red. Not knowing how to turn it around, Stanley put Hortense in charge… figuring that a woman would know what other women of her age range and class would want to buy.

Hortense is the toughest character to empathize with of this bunch, as she did not want the job she inherited. She was good at it, mind you, but she really just wanted to be a housewife. Stanley left her for a younger woman – an aviator, who was friends with Amelia Earhart – and Hortense blamed this on her having a job. In reality, the author thinks Stanley was already planning to leave, and gave Hortense a “project” to keep her busy.

Hortense, not surprisingly, moved on from being in the working world after only ten years.

Dorothy was a little more engaged with her employment. She moved to NYC on a whim, with her younger sister, and the two started a small company making dolls. After a while, her sister was tired of the manufacturing side of that enterprise, but when they closed up shop, Dorothy was hired on at the big retailer who’d been selling their wares – Lord & Taylor.

Not only did she rise through the ranks quickly, but she brought new ideas to the table regularly. Finding and supporting American designers – in a time when most couture came from Europe – was one thing she excelled at. Another was hosting large events to garner interest and press… including one fundraising ball that grew to become the Met Gala, still held annually.

Geraldine started in journalism, but covering fashion quickly led to big names in the industry asking her for advice. Only in her 30s, she was given the reigns of another older retailer looking to revitalize its reputation – Henri Bendel. The shop itself was smaller than its competitors, so she tried something new: breaking it up into even smaller parts. The redesign of the physical space created specialized “shops” within the bigger store, each with its own vibe.

Bendel was exclusive, too, often ordering only 6 of a new product! Geraldine sent buyers around the world to find unique items from faraway places, but as the years went on, a lot of her discoveries would get snatched by other retailers only months or even weeks after appearing at Bendel. Always finding the next new thing – and catering to the elite, from royalty to Streisand – kept the store afloat for another 30 years.

While all of these stores were competitors with each other, their biggest threat eventually came from the concept of easily replicated styles being sold nationwide: mass production and malls.

Another detail I found interesting in all this was sizing. Bendel, for example, only sold clothes up to today’s size 6. Lord & Taylor was the first retailer to start a petite line. Meanwhile, another NYC-based seamstress started the first line of maternity clothes… and eventually started catering to all kinds of bigger figures with her Lane Bryant stores. Appealing to unique size ranges was one way these stores differentiated themselves from each other.

Overall, this was a fascinating read. Department stores, while originally owned by men, were one of the first places a working woman could establish a career for herself. And while many women worked during wartime, they could continue in these jobs even after the men came home. Not everyone thought women should be in charge – including one of the profiled women in charge! But overall, it was one area of business where a woman could excel using her own creativity and fashion sense.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for a digital advance reader's copy. All comments and opinions are my own.

This book describes the history of department stores, women’s rise to positions of power in the female-centric retail business, and specifically profiles the three visionary women who were behind the golden age of American department stores.

The book primarily focuses on “three American women who made twentieth-century department stores a mecca for women of every age, social class, and ambition:” Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel's.

In addition to the upscale stores of New York’s Fifth Avenue, there is brief mention of other stores that became ingrained in the American shopping culture. For instance, Walmart, Kmart, and Target – all of which happened to be founded in the same year – 1962.

While I found the history fascinating, and appreciated author Julie Satow’s meticulous research, I became impatient with the level of detail, i.e. Hortense Odlum’s marital woes. On the other hand, the history of mannequins was fascinating. I think this would have been more entertaining as historical fiction, but nonetheless I’m glad I read this one-of-a-kind book.

If you appreciate fashion and marketing, like to shop, enjoy history of American culture, appreciate strong and complex women – this is the book for you.

After my last book, it was time for something a little more fun but behind the frivolity of this well-researched read are lots of insights about retail past and present. I loved Julie Satow’s book on The Plaza hotel and her latest, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue is equally appealing, a book that reads like fiction but delivers lots of fascinating historical insights into the rise of department stores in the 1930s and beyond. She chronicles the unique tension between stores founded by men but catering to women and how, eventually, it was often women that helped turn these department stores into more than simple places to shop. So many of the things we think of as new such as experiential retail are actually ideas that come from these earlier days.

Women in command at this time often had ambivalence about their roles. Hortense Odlum, the housewife turned Bonwit Teller executive, seemed almost embarrassed by her success and how it conflicted with her idea of the perfect housewife and mother. Dorothy Shaver, the phenom behind the rise of Lord & Taylor, earned a million-dollar salary but was skilled at hiding her business acumen behind a homespun charm. These women of fashion weren’t afraid to take risks; they had the courage of their convictions, but they also had to play within a male framework. I like to think that’s changed. I’m frequently aware it hasn’t.

Satow always excels at the little details and at bringing moments from history to life like the time Salvador Dali’s avant-garde window display ended up with him in jail after tossing a bathtub through a store window. The book is also a love letter to those names from yesteryear, like Henri Bendel’s and I Magnin, that were once the height of sophistication. The part about Geraldine Stutz and the world of Bendel’s, as it moved through the youthquake era, reminded me of my aunt, who was a fashion buyer in the 1970s. She seemed the height of glamour to me, and it was great to be reminded of that era, of the generation of bold, fashionable women wrestling with society’s changing morés.

This is an interesting book to read at a time when department stores appear to be on the ropes. Henri Bendel’s sputtered out in 2019, Lord & Taylor is still a website, Bonwit Teller is long gone and so many of the brands I grew up with are all history’s footnotes. I’m a firm advocate of physical retail, but the allure of the one-stop shop appears to be fading. This book had me wondering how Dorothy Shaver and other retail giants from the past might re-imagine our current shopping world. Women are still the primary consumers, but the ways we shop and what we expect to get from our shopping are far different. Are the heirs to these groundbreaking women the social media influencers of today, the designers on Etsy, or something else entirely?

This was a very well written book. It has an easy flow and covers a lot of ground quickly while not leaving the reader wanting. I grew up in mall culture so it was interesting to read about the dominance of department stores and the amazing women that ran them. I had never heard of any of the women in these stories and I walked away with a newfound respect and appreciation.

Study of the fashion industry on Fifth Avenue, NYC with emphasis on three main women
As a well-written archival study, I give it four-stars. As a reader of less academic works, I give it three-stars. I expected something entirely different from this book which is on me. It is definitely a well-researched study of how women played such a contribution to the success of fashion and thereby Fifth Avenue in that era. I was truly blown away with the lives of the principal women’s lives explored: Hortense Odlum, Geraldine Stutz, Dorothy Shaver and her sister Elsie. There were several other women of note and no less impressive in their endeavors.
Just some random thoughts:
Interesting to see in many photographs that the executive women had cigarettes sophisticatedly held in their hands. Obviously, a sign of the times;
Fascinating how differently Hortense accepted her success from the other women;
With few exceptions, the women improved their respective stores beyond what the men before them had done;
One thing was clear, no matter how successful these women were, they were paid far less than their male counterparts;
There were lots of interesting and incidental factoids and pictures; especially enjoyed the gossipy parts the most;
Coincidentally, these incidental facts sometimes left the narrative with many shifts in content which was distracting. Segue here, segue there…
There were some quotes of the time that could have been written today they were so “au courant”
Maxey Jarman, Geraldine’s mentor, “if women are any good, it’s because they are women, not in spite of it”

Overall, I think this is an excellent source for research into this era, this topic and/or these people. This gave me real insight into a time and place that is fascinating to me while coincidentally feeling foreign. At the same time, in the quote from “The Wall Street Journal” it referred to “dashing through it.” Well, if that meant skipping pages, I concur. Again, this was an interesting book but not one I expected. I volunteered to review an ARC of this book through NetGalley.

There were parts of this that I found riveting, but it’s extremely heavy on personal biography, and the content I expect most of us were looking for—the history of department stores in this era—suffers as a result.

Some ancillary background on the women central to the story is fine, but I would have greatly preferred that more of this was dedicated to their professional innovations.

And while most of the women are worthy if not terribly intriguing subjects beyond their roles on Fifth Avenue, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with someone like Hortense. Like RIP baby doll, you would have loved Harrison Butker. Ick.

The best parts of this are more focused on shop innovations and backstory on things like the history of mannequins. I would have loved more on that and less of, say, Hortense actualizing her own personal success and then turning around and condemning women who came after who were trying to do the same.

This flows better and is more consistently readable than The Plaza, but it has a similar problem in that it fails to focus satisfactorily on the material that makes most readers take an interest in the book.

My biggest takeaways from this book are 1. Satow is thorough in her research and 2. I hate Donald Trump even more for what he did to the Bonwit Teller Building.

Satow does an excellent job of sharing these three women’s stories without any bias or major dramatization, something I highly commend her on. As a woman who loves reading books about women’s history, I was surprised to find that I didn’t like Hortense Odlum at all. Her viewpoints are very old-fashioned and at times on the anti-feminist side, but I feel that her story is crucial to this book. We don’t always have to like the women who make history, and even though I’m not a Hortense fan, she did pave the way for other women in the retail business.

This was quite an enjoyable read and the next time I’m on 5th Ave I’ll be mourning the loss of the architectural beauty that the Bonwit Teller Building was.

To say that I am not the audience for this book would be a massive understatement. 13 years of Catholic School, and then right into the Army after that, means fashion is my ultimate weakness. I know my belt should match my shoes or something. I digress. Julie Satow would need to do a lot of work to make When Women Ran Fifth Avenue appealing to my brain. Somehow, she did it!

Satow follows the career paths of three main women of fashion in New York throughout the early to mid-1900s. Each woman gets her own part biography and then a look at the changes she made to the fashion industry but mostly focused on their specific employers at the time. Interspersed are some smaller chapters on different people and topics related to the fashion industry but not the overall narrative. Satow writes all of this quite well by never leaning too hard into any one thing. Some of it is biography but also business, fashion, and personal relationships.

Another interesting aspect is Satow's willingness to tell the whole story. There is a version of this book where it is marketed as a celebration of feminism with inconvenient details papered over. Satow doesn't hide from the fact that one of her main characters disavows her business career later in life. It makes the narrative more interesting and lets the reader draw their own conclusions when given the whole story. Needless to say, (but I will anyway) Satow did the impossible. She made a fashion book even I could enjoy.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and the publisher.)

A peek at the glory days of department stores and how women impacted their destinies

There was a time when department stores were places of wonder, where beautiful clothing and objects were on offer and salespeople were both plentiful and helpful. Maybe you remember going to such a store with your mother or your grandmother, when it was An Occasion; possibly you even had lunch or tea there, or watched as your mother or grandmother had their hair done in the salon right inside the store. If you're too young to have done so, and your impression of department stores is what we experience in today’s world….I am so sorry that you missed it. I remember going into Boston with my grandmother to Jordan Marsh, a store which sadly no longer exists, and coming home with a box of their freshly baked blueberry muffins tied up with baker’s twine as a treat for coming along. Years later, my first job out of college would be as a sales manager at that very same store, and going on to work in their buying offices. By that time, retail stores had already changed a great deal from the heyday of the early to mid 1900’s, but there were still some touches in place that harkened back to those times. In this new book from author Julie Salow, I learned more about the influence department stores had on society, and that society had on the stores (particularly when it came to women) during those years, as well as the story of several women, three in particular, who had leadership roles at three of these iconic stores. They took different paths to reach those positions, and had differing motivations for the career each would have….and I had never heard of a single one of them prior to starting the book although I knew of the store each had led. There was Hortense Odlum, whose husband’s finances survived the stock market crash of 1929 so he had the resources to buy up companies that financially struggled in the following years. One such company was Bonwit Teller, and in the 1930’s Hortense would be persuaded to go look around and see if she had any ideas on how to change things around to make the store profitable. Despite having no business background or experience in retail, she would not only devise and initiate improvements that would result in the tripling of sales figures, she would become first president of the company and later chairman of the board. In the 1940’s, another woman would rise to the top of a major store, in this case Lord & Taylor. Dorothy Shaver was an ambitious young woman who arrived in NYC with her younger sister Elsie, and through a combination of talent, connections and hard work she had the opportunity to rise to a position of influence, becoming a major champion of American designers when women relied solely on European houses for inspirations, leading Lord & Taylor to the heights of fashion and retail success, and becoming the first businesswoman to earn a million dollar salary. The third woman, Geraldine Stutz, went from being a fashion magazine editor to, with the backing and support of a business mogul who recognized her talents, heading Henri Bendel and creating the It store for the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Through much of the twentieth century, retail stores were one of the few places where women could have a lifelong career with opportunities for advancement. As someone who spent a decade in that business, I was intrigued to learn about these women and others who made their mark in a pre-women’s liberation world, who had insight and created a vision that revitalized their companies and provided a trail for other women to follow. For readers who are interested in the world of fashion and/or department stores, in the history of New York City in the 1920’s through the 1970’s and beyond, who enjoyed watching Mad Men or Selfridge’s, or enjoyed a book like Margot Lee Shetterly”s Hidden Figures, then I encourage you to give When Women Ran Fifth Avenue a try. Many thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for allowing me early access to this book that brought back memories of a different world.

Julie Salow brings us an extensively researched offering of women who forged the way in department stores on Fifth Avenue New York in the 20th Century. This is a work of nonfiction that reads like a fiction novel, so it was very interesting to learn about these three department stores that started to flourish with the touch of the women who took over. There is so much fascinating information on how the changes in times of war, women's rights, racial inequalities and the like affected the success of these stores. This was an enjoyable read.

Thank you to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed are my own.