Downtowns are under siege—not only by the ubiquitous malls and branch stores strewn across the urban and suburban landscape but by a virtual explosion of online shopping. Who needs to go downtown to buy a pair of shoes, a coat, or a lipstick anymore? Who among us feels the need to support brick-and-mortar stores when we can click and have anything we want delivered for free the next day? American cities have changed dramatically since the 1950s, and even as populations in many metropolitan areas are rebounding, the vitality of classic downtowns often is not. The consequences of deindustrialization and the migration to the suburbs have sapped the urban core. Flagship department stores have relocated if not closed, and downtowns have become something other than destinations for shoppers or even tourists.

A Shoppers’ Paradise takes the reader to the beginning of the story—to Chicago, the “shock city” of the late nineteenth century, when the Loop, the heart of downtown, “came to be nearly saturated with businesses that relied on female consumption” (3). How and why this happened—how female consumers virtually took over the central city, and in the process helped to create the modern, moneyed metropolis—is the story that Emily Remus so ably tells. What we see is both familiar and novel: the dynamic processes that made the city of Chicago into the “Great Central Market” of the Midwest—a vast railroad network, shrewd business decisions, attention to urban planning—as well as the less well-known debates and clashing political visions that transformed the built environment and turned the center of the city into what Émile Zola called “Au Bonheur des Dames”—a lady's paradise. Women's presence in the Loop was initially an intrusion on a male landscape oriented toward finance, wholesale, and manufacturing; women came into this space as visitors in the 1870s and 1880s, but by the time of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, they had made it their own.

Any major transformation carries tensions, and in this telling the process was rife with them. What Remus calls the “moral legitimacy” of the new consumer economy and the changing place of women in public life brought multiple anxieties into play, not the least of which was a revolution in gender mores. Could—and should—women enter new commercial public spaces unchaperoned? Should women drink “restorative” alcoholic bracers publicly in hotels, restaurants, and department stores? Was the “matinee girl,” that impulsive and unsettling new urban type, threatening her own reputation as she potentially abandoned herself to more sensuous pleasures? These were serious concerns as women increasingly found satisfaction outside the domestic environment and, in doing so, strained older codes of respectability. This new leisure class of moneyed women in the Gilded Age, eager to see and be seen, to shop and to imbibe culture, is no longer a new story. The literature on shopping and women and department stores and a transformed urban civic life in the late nineteenth century has been growing for the past few decades; Remus mines it well, but she adds new material that makes hers a story with numerous twists.

The fact that the color line in the stores was rigid even as the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 1885 barred discrimination and guaranteed equal access to public accommodations is, again, not an unknown history. African American women could and did work in private homes—as laundresses, cooks, nannies, and maids—but they were decidedly not welcome in most public commercial spaces, particularly restaurants, and they were not hired as clerks or saleswomen in department stores to serve the very same women they worked for as domestic laborers. (A generation later, their daughters in New York became involved in a “don't shop where you can't work campaign” and ultimately forced stores in Harlem to hire African American salesclerks, albeit light skinned ones.) Black women might shop in the great emporiums, but often they could not try on clothes, and they could not assume they would be served in the restaurants, be seated in theaters, or comfortably use the many accommodations set aside for women in the Loop; their interactions were always subject to uncertainties. Remus nods to racial discrimination in each chapter of the book, but she never makes more than passing mention of it. Similarly, she mentions only briefly that other dividing line—religion—and the sometimes subtle and other times virulent anti-Semitism that moneyed Jewish families encountered. Whereas African American women were instantly recognizable, wealthy Jewish women were not. Still, as Jews, they could find it difficult to join private clubs and civic associations—a very different and but no less pointed form of discrimination.

Remus's is a story of money and class. Chapter One, “Moneyed Women and the Downtown,” sets the tone, yet it is never very clear how many wealthy women there were. The immense throngs that contributed to sidewalk and street congestion four times larger than anything seen in the twenty-first century could not all have been “wealthy women” (195). Middle-class women, shopping both as a domestic chore and a leisure activity, were the lion's share of department stores’ clientele, but they never really make an appearance in these pages. A more finely tuned class analysis would have added to what is essentially a tale of women who either inherited wealth or whose fathers or husbands made a great deal of money in the freewheeling world of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Entering the market as consumers, these wealthy women claimed new opportunities and essentially remade the economic order, but Remus would have done well to highlight that they did not do it alone.

Remus uses the remaining chapters to discuss flashpoints. Whether it was fears of women in hoopskirts taking up too much space on the sidewalks, the problem of large hats in the theater and the issue of consumer rights (i.e., the right to see the stage), or the exaggerated concern over unescorted women, the question of what was responsible and respectable female behavior was always percolating. One particularly cogent discussion, in chapter five, focuses on sexual danger in the city. The “Masher”—the sexually aggressive man who haunted the retail district and harassed women—became a new and serious urban problem. The question of how to render the streets safe for women, which has continued to the present day, emerged for the first time in Gilded Age cities. Women insisted on the right to safe passage in the city, and urban officials were forced to respond.

While the commercial core—the department stores, restaurants, hotels, and streets—is the backdrop for Remus's story, it is the women with disposable income and leisure time who are the singular focus. Their ability to transform the geography of downtown Chicago had ramifications for “wannabe” cities across the Midwest. Chicago's story is their story.