Role of Department Stores, Baseball, and the Vaudeville House in the 19th Century City (Essay Sample)

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8 May 2015
Role of Department Stores, Baseball, and the Vaudeville House in the 19th Century City
According to Gunther Barth, in his book City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, an exceptional American town society developed during the period between 1830 and 1910, which forced the individuals living in the urban areas to establish ways of attaining happiness, identify together with security. He particularly claims that the department store, the apartment house, baseball and the vaudeville house directed the anarchy and autonomy of present day cities into a tradition that gave a solution to the major challenges of the existence of urban centers as seen by the large groups of individuals. Such challenges include the need for communication and lack of identity, the wish by women to participate in the big city way of life, the search for leisure by men as part of the existence of cities, and the hope by everyone to stand out in a crowd (Barth 23).
The culture that these institutions (department store, the apartment house, baseball and the vaudeville) established, vanished with the introduction or arrival of the automobile. For the purposes of ascertaining this position, the writer develops what he refers to as an intellectual construct from the practical evidence. According to him, the departmental stores appeared instantaneously or concurrently in the America and Europe; however, in the United States, they were the exceptional province of women and, actually, brought women to the town center that was initially under the dominance of them men. Marketing, sales, female clerks, and various products and services had a remarkable impact as it brought women of different regions and classes together (112-118).
Another impact that the departmental stores had on the 19th Century city was on the labor force; for instance, Marshall Field, in the year 1904, employed people in the range of 9,000 and 10,000. The traditional retail stores wanted workers that would be responsible for various jobs, whereas the departmental stores needed many more employees, and this enhanced specialization since each one of them had his or her own task and there was nothing like diversification, or sharing of tasks. As a result, most of the tasks in the department stores did not require specialized skills, and the stores’ greater size implied that the top leadership could have greater salaries because they were considered to be doing a lot of work.
Perhaps, the most considerable effect of the department store on labor force was that women were brought into the retail labor force. The conventional retail stores held the assumption that their work was too demanding and difficult for women, but the managers of the department stores believed that most of the specialized tasks in their stores, particularly in clerical work and sales, did not exclusively need manly features and could be occupied by the lower-paid women of female labor force.
Nonetheless, with just a few other alternatives available to the women, most of them went for the jobs at the department stores despite the fact that the wages were very low as compared to other positions held by men. As the clerical and sales positions absorbed more and more women, the criticism on the department stores concerning the manner in which they handled their workers continued mounting. In 1913, managers from two big department stores, Carson Pirie Scott and Marshall Field were engaged in the federal legislative hearings on the suggested minimum wage for the workers. The labor practices of the stores increasingly gained more disrepute and notoriety as the managers affirmed that it was still possible to increase the wages of their female employees by one hundred percent and still make good profits; yet they were still not ready to offer the women a good pay that was proportional to their work, or the revenues that they generated for the stores.
Despite all the difficulties that the women were subjected to, the stores still taught them the art of fashion, whereby this greatly enabled them to take part in the urban culture. This gave the women the sense of belonging as they interacted among themselves and even with the men freely. The women felt a great departure from their tradition as this new culture impressed them such that they embraced it fully, and this gave them confidence in life, something that they had been lacking ever since. Moreover, several people came to the department stores for window-shopping; others gawped at the marvels of modern-day design and the technology that showed them what could be offered by the new industrial world.
On the other hand, baseball similarly taught the men city life; the advocacy for recreation by the Social Gospel movement as a genuine activity encouraged a lot of people to take part in the spectator sports. The sport also taught the participants about competition or rivalry, competence, official rules and brilliance, which all governed jobs and play. Those who part...