Shopping in Philadelphia: Women in Shops

Elizabeth Ruffin from the cover of her published diaries

Almost 200 years ago a 20 year old Virginia woman was treated to a tour of the North. Elizabeth Ruffin (1807-1849) and her older half-brother Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865) did Philadelphia, New York, Saratoga, Niagara Falls and Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, among other social hubs. I think he was trying to marry her off, but she wasn't having it. Their first stop was Philadelphia where they shopped.

Chestnut Street, Philadelphia's fashionable shopping street

in the 1850s. The photos are long after Elizabeth's visit.

Photography had not been invented in 1827.

Library of Congress

Tuesday, July 31, 1827. "Went out shopping, carried brother along and entertained him agreeably over the counter, no doubt increased his natural fondness for the employment by introducing him to the millinery and mantua [dress] making department, give him a deal of credit for exercising such strain'd patience....

Women clerks at L.J. Levy & Co a few decades later

"Enter the Stores and there are women only to be seen, manage all matters and almost carry on the whole exclusively, as to the men they are things of nought...seem to have not part or lot in the matter."

The next day they "formed a part of the fashionable promenader on Chestnut Street, the place of most general resort for exercise and my feet are now aching....the streets do indeed look most inviting; the stores are all illuminated but the brightness of the glass-establishments is dazzling almost to blindness."

Another view of Levy's the fashionable city's most fashionable store

The following day: "Went out shopping in the morning and witnessed habits so strange to me; for instance; entered a Shoe-Store, business carried on in a large scale and managed entirely by the females who not merely sew them but sale them too with their delicate hands, not a male to be seen behind many counters."

And on Friday: "Really I am getting right tired of Philadelphia; can't get any waiting on, obliged to do it my self...my eyes have seen till they are saturated....

She and Edmund picked up the gowns she had ordered on Tuesday. His unexpected patience delighted her.

"I will not say a single word against him in any matter for he has left his old self at home...so attentive, so accommodating, [waiting] on some mantua-makers for the completion of my Dresses all too without murmuring or scolding in the least; who will believe me? certainly no soul at home."

(I think he was trying to marry her off and she needed a new wardrobe. His time was an investment.)

The city market in 1856

On Tuesday they also went to the market-house "really worth seeing; it extends a mile in length, right in the middle of the street frequented all times of the day where the women are always ready to receive customers and when not thus engaged, are sewing or knitting by their baskets, never idle I believe they do two-thirds of the business in the whole city."

Market on Hanover Street, 1860

Photo attributed to Charles Himes

"I admire this independence much among the females tho' carried rather too far, (driving a cart for instance) and think when I return [to Coggins Point] I shall be induced to venture much further on old Turtle (her horse?)

Evergreen Plantation, Elizabeth's home

Coggins Point is on the James River in Prince George County

The Ruffins stayed at Philadelphia's United States Hotel with a view of the First Bank of the United States. She thought the classical building "clumsy, disproportion'd and unsightly...pillars almost all the way of a size, no symmetry or beauty about them."

Elizabeth's amazement at the female sales forces working in Philadelphia is revealing. Her Virginia  experience was quite the opposite, a contrast illustrating the point that female roles were perceived differently at different times and different places. There is no one past attitude about women's work.

Many of us may remember our grandmothers' view of working women but their grandmothers might have had completely different opinions. We can contrast Philadelphia and all its women workers in 1827 with South Carolina in the mid-20th century. According to the memories of  Polish immigrant Libby Friedman Levinson (1909-2000) when interviewed in 1995:

"My mother was not a businesswoman. My mother always used to say God put a curse on her because her two daughters were businesswomen. She thought it was horrible for a woman to work in a store. She would cry about it."

Elizabeth Ruffin did not find romance on her tour through the north. By the end of the eight weeks she was so bored she "had to go out to buy something to sew on." Perhaps the problem was that she had an arrangement with her first cousin at home Harrison Henry Cocke, whom she married in 1828. She felt somewhat out of place in the North; she missed cornbread and fresh peaches. And as she noted above, she was used to being waited upon. A slaveholder on her own without any "servants" was obliged to do it herself, a rude awakening.

Brother Edmund Ruffin was the notorious "fire-eater" whose rhetoric contributed mightily to secessionist ideology. Her analysis of his personality, undergoing a "wonderful metamorphosis" on the trip, is a private view of a man considered the archetype of the extreme Southern radical, one who shot himself in 1865 rather than face a defeated Confederacy. Elizabeth did not live to see the Civil War; she died at the age of 42 at her sister's in Mobile, Alabama, seeking relief from tuberculosis.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/52011993/elizabeth-cocke

Read Elizabeth's diary: An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67, edited by Michael O'Brien. Here's a Google Books preview:
https://books.google.com/books?id=FPpFOppGB6AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Libby Friedman Levinson interview: Jewish Heritage Collection at the Lowcountry Digital Library http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:86557

And see a post here on "Fancy Stores" in Philadelphia:
https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/02/fancy-stores-in-philadelphia.html