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By Root 7881 0

because it hadn’t come from Paris and no society leader (or even actress) would take it up. Style-conscious working-class women agreed: when a manufacturer of painted window shades urged his female employees to wear bloomer dress, as their voluminous skirts were brushing against the still-wet product, they refused, accepting dismissal rather than don the outfit. Truth to tell, even Bloomerites found the costume unattractive, and when the hoop skirt arrived, bearing the endorsement of Empress Eugénie of France, Bloomer herself adopted it, declaring that its doing away with heavy petticoats was an acceptable enough reform. Stanton hung on alone until 1853, then gave up.

Soon the hoop skirt was all the rage. With firms like Douglass and Sherwood of Broadway churning out four thousand of them daily, it was clear that the bloomer movement had run up against more than gender stereotyping and bad design. The fashion system was as deeply imbricated in New York City’s economy as was prostitution, and the profitable matrix of designers, department stores, fashion entrepreneurs, garment manufacturers, and the clothing trade would prove highly resistant to tampering.

“LINDOMANIA” AND “HIGH-FLYER STAMPEDES”

In the world of commercial entertainment it was much the same. The imperatives of profit opened new pathways for city women, though only if they stayed within prescribed patterns and places of consumption.

Barriers tumbled quickest in the midtown entertainment district. Where it had been quite improper for a woman of refinement to enter a public eating house, feeding ladies became a lucrative business. Some restaurants allowed mixed dining, others arranged special accommodations (ladies’ dining rooms, separate ladies’ entrances), and some (notably ice cream parlors like Taylor’s) became completely identified as women’s spaces. The explosion in the number of women travelers speeded this transformation, as such visitors were obliged to eat in public. Many of the new hotels established reserved drawing rooms. Astor House went farther, refusing to admit any lady unless accompanied by a gentleman: while this offended reputable single women, it effectively excluded prostitutes.

The presence or absence of prostitutes was key to theatrical developments too. Playhouses wanted to draw more respectable women. They courted such ladies by installing special lobbies in which they could promenade between acts and by keeping lights on halfway during performances so they could take one another’s measure. But the third tier remained a galling obstacle, and many women boycotted theaters that retained one. Instead they flocked to musical venues like the Astor Opera House, the Academy of Music, and the New York Philharmonic Society, where, as Lydia Maria Child noted, “no degraded corner is reserved for unveiled vice.” Seeking respectable patronage, the Park Theater substituted a “family circle” for its third tier in 1848. Most theaters refused to follow suit. Convinced that the presence of prostitutes was crucial to profitability, many handed out free tickets in the brothels.

It was left to the shrewdest impresario of them all to demonstrate the lucrative possibilities in marketing respectability. P. T. Barnum had observed that women patrons considered content as crucial as audience. When Lola Montez came to town, her reputation as mistress of the king of Bavaria preceded her, and when she appeared onstage as dancer or actress, New York’s ladies were as one in boycotting her scandalous person. So, in the late 1840s, Barnum sanitized his American Museum. He banned prostitutes, prohibited liquor, cracked down on raucous audiences, and cleaned up his acts. He introduced matinees and continuous performances and pointedly featured “moral” presentations: scriptural dramas, the occasional Shakespeare play “shorn of its objectionable features,” and temperance melodramas like The Drunkard (1850), which ran without interruption for over a hundred performances, breaking all New York records. Women and entire families streamed in, proving to Barnum’s satisfaction