A New Book Spotlights a Trio of Swashbuckling Female Retail Executives

As Émile Zola captured it in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise, the 19th-century Parisian department store was one of the few places women could venture into unaccompanied. Some 50 years later, women in the United States were running those stories themselves.

In Julie Satow’s latest book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, three women are spotlighted for their profound impact on the 20th-century fashion industry: Hortense Odlum (president of Bonwit Teller from 1934 to 1940), Dorothy Shaver (president of Lord & Taylor from 1945 to 1959), and Geraldine Stutz (president of Henri Bendel from 1957 to 1986).

“I had this concept that women in the workforce, in leadership roles particularly, was a more modern phenomenon,” says Satow, a journalist whose first book told the history of the vaunted Plaza Hotel. “It was fascinating, eye-opening, and rewarding to research this book and find out that there’s this whole generation of women that were breaking the mold before maybe a lot of us thought that was the case.” She adds, “Macy’s hired its first woman executive in the 1890s!”

In the early 20th century, the influence and role of the department store was akin to a fashion magazine’s: Without the internet or social media, if you wanted to know what was happening in fashion, you could either open an issue of Vogue or take a turn about a department store.

“Department stores were this kind of unheralded vehicle for fashion designers. Dorothy Shaver’s role was so critical to the creation of Claire McCardell and Elizabeth Hawes’s labels—Lord & Taylor, under her, was the first store to actually put the names of American fashion designers in ads,” Satow says. She adds that with Bendel’s, Stutz brought Sonia Rykiel and Jean Muir to the US and helped launch the career of Stephen Burrows. In other words, these women were fashion king-makers, disseminating and promoting clothing so that it journeyed from a designer’s atelier to retail mannequins to the bodies of Americans.

As the book’s title suggests, Odlum, Shaver, and Stutz were responsible for running their retail business on 5th Avenue, and Satow recounts their journeys to the top of the fashion industry. (As a bonus, she also sprinkles in shorter histories of another notable woman in fashion.)