The Department Store

There was a time a woman couldn't be out in public by herself.

Rewind to the 1800s, in cities like London, Paris and New York. A middle class woman alone on the street got read as a prostitute, and literally half the places downtown were closed to her or flat out illegal to walk into without a man.

Virginia Woolf said walking down Piccadilly by herself felt like being out in "a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge."

Then the department stores opened.

And the men building them figured out something that had nothing to do with clothes. If they wanted women to shop, women had to be able to actually be there.

So they made the store feel like a house.

They lined the floors with carpet. Brought in big lounge chairs. They hired women to work the counter. There were tea rooms built into the store, because a woman wasn't allowed to eat in a restaurant by herself. They even built private dressing rooms.

And society gave it the green light. If the place felt like a home, then a woman inside it wasn't out in public, and her reputation walked back out the door with her.

But none of that solved the real problem.

A woman with nowhere to use a bathroom can't stay downtown past mid-morning. She has to go home, no matter how welcome she is everywhere else.

So they built ladies' rooms.

The plumbing was the freedom.

Now nothing could stop her from being out all day. On her own, spending her own time, with her friends, no husband, nobody's permission. And they started going, in huge numbers, until a woman alone on a sidewalk stopped being a scandal and started being a regular morning.

The receipt in her hand was the permission slip.

As long as she was shopping, she was allowed to be there.

Imagine that. A building put up to get women to spend money, and without meaning to, it helped start one of the biggest movements toward female equality the world has ever seen. (We will talk about what it did for the suffrage movement later. That part is even better.)

I did not have department stores on my list of things that changed women's lives.

PUT ON your inheritance and walk out into the open. You don’t need an excuse or a destination. A solo espresso. A slow drift through a shop window. The scenic route back. Those women once had to carry a receipt as a permission slip just to exist on the street. You have nothing to prove. Step out and claim the freedom that took them a century to build.