In the London shops I did not think women were so generally employed
as in our own, or those of the Continent. But this may have been a
conclusion from careless observation. In the book-stores to which I most
resorted, and which I did not think so good as ours, I remember to have
seen but one saleswoman. Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large
stores where women's goods, personal and household, are sold, and which
I again did not think comparable to ours. Seldom in any small shop, or
even book-stall or newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge.
But at the street-markets, especially those for the poorer customers,
market-women were the rule. I should say, in fine, that woman was a far
more domestic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the beast
of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German cities great or small;
but I am not going to sentimentalize her lot in England. Probably it is
only comparatively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and lowest
its hardship is attested by the stunted stature, and the stunted figure
of the ordinary English lower-class woman. Even among the elect of
the afternoon parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great an
average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show with us, where
they form the patriciate which our plutocracy has already flowered into.
But there was a far greater average of tall young men than with
us; which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a masculine
distinction.
As for those great department stores with which the question of women
relates itself inevitably, I have cursorily assumed our priority in
them, and the more I think of them, the more I am inclined to believe
myself right. But that is a matter in which women only may be decisive;
the nice psychology involved cannot be convincingly studied by the other
sex. I will venture, again, however, so far into this strange realm as
to say that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so good in
London as in New York, though when one remembers the two Bond Streets,
and Oxford, and lower Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of
claiming superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty-third
streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts of Third and Sixth
avenues to which ladies' shopping has spread. After all, perhaps there
is but one London, in this as in some other things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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