Labor of Love (6 page)

“Personality” was different. Personality was something that manifested on your surface. The word comes from the Latin
persona
, meaning mask. Personality was like “painting”—a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men. Turn-of-the-century psychologists had diagnosed patients with abnormal minds as having “personality disorders
.
” Starting around 1920, however, experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too. Suddenly, the word was all over the popular press.

Authors who wrote about romance used it to refer to outward expressions and behaviors. In the context of dating, to have a “good personality” or to simply “have personality” meant to have charisma. This was an asset whether you were selling handkerchiefs or selling yourself. But what exactly it was, was difficult to capture.

The popular writer Elinor Glyn simply called it “it.” In a two-part short story that appeared in
Cosmopolitan
magazine in 1926, Glyn defined “it” as a mysterious kind of animal magnetism. “With ‘It,'” Glyn wrote, “you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man.”

The story was adapted into a movie of the same title in the following year. Clara Bow plays a shopgirl who has “it”—and has her eye on her manager, Cyrus. Cyrus is the son of the owner of the department store where Clara works. He will inherit it someday, and Clara is determined to marry him. The “It Girl” uses “it” like a currency, to obtain the best man it can afford her. Yet Glyn insisted that an It Girl was above all effortless.

“Unselfconsciousness, and self-confidence, and indifference as to whether you're pleasing or not, and something in you which gives the impression that you're not at all cold,” she wrote. “That makes ‘it.'”

This suggested that It could not be learned. But the fact that personality was external meant that you could endeavor to improve it. Between 1910 and 1930, a growing number of books of dating advice promised to tell young women how.

In 1915,
The New York Times
reported on a lecture that Susanna Cocroft, the bestselling author of
Beauty a Duty
, gave at the Astor Theatre in New York. She was promoting her new book,
What to Eat and When
, but she ended up telling the packed house that “poise” could be more effective than a diet.

She encouraged her fans to develop poise by studying and mimicking the appearance of fashion models who possessed it.

“Place a beautiful figure on your wall, and compare that with the lines of your own body,” she instructed. “Express your ideals with your body as in the pictures you express your ideals on your walls.”

“Beauty is no longer vanity; it is use,” Cocroft said. A waitress or a shopgirl could be fired at any time simply because someone her boss found prettier showed up and asked for her position.

Nineteenth-century writers on health, hygiene, and etiquette had offered women plenty of wisdom regarding courtship and marriage. But they did not teach
strategies
for winning and keeping a man by manipulating his emotions. Indeed, they denounced such calculated approaches to romance as coquetry. In the age of personality, however, the experts declared that it was perfectly acceptable—indeed, absolutely necessary—for a woman to
work
to win a lover. She just had to make it seem effortless. Otherwise she risked committing one of the cardinal sins of the era of taste: She would look like she was trying too hard.

*   *   *

The skills that helped a Shopgirl like Clara Bow in her romantic life also served her well at work. Personality was an asset on the sales floor as well as on the street. Bosses hoped that their employees would inspire desire for what they sold.

Samuel Reyburn, the president of Lord & Taylor, claimed the Shopgirl could improve her personality simply through her “daily observations of customers in the building.” After spending enough time in the store, “she will lower the tone of her voice, grow quiet in manner, exhibit better taste in the selection of her clothes, become more considerate of others.” Reyburn described this process as if it took place unconsciously, as a matter of course.

Shopgirls themselves knew better. A Shopgirl knew that the personality she expressed through her likes and her behavior was not something she was born with. Personality consisted of myriad effects that she had to work hard to produce. Anyone who ventures into online dating relearns this lesson. To construct a picture of yourself through photographs and likes and other gestures takes a lot of effort and requires constant tweaking to maintain.

“A friend, Derek, told me that if I listed
Sleeping Beauty
among my favorite movies on OkCupid, I would attract creeps and weirdos,” a writer for
New York
magazine recounted of her own dating profile. “He went on. For instance, to list
Gilmore Girls
among my favorite TV shows was fine, but I should balance it with something more aggressive, like
The Sopranos
. My favorite foods should include something savory, not just ‘pie' and ‘jam.'”

In O. Henry's story, Nancy tailors her personality as craftily as she stitches up her knockoff clothes. She studies her customers' habits, adopting “the best from each.” “From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing ‘inferiors in station.'”

In Frances Donovan's
Saleslady
study, one fellow department store worker described the thrill of using her charisma to sell frocks. “My great joy was to be so nice to them it would put them to shame. Very soon I had them eating out of my hand.”

The skills that you developed at work made you better at dating, and vice versa. It turned out that selling handkerchiefs and selling yourself required young women to do many of the same things. The most effective women could do both at once.

In the 1930s, the renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills interviewed dozens of shopgirls as part of the study that would eventually become his book
White Collar
. The typology he created included the kind of shopgirl he called the “Charmer,” who perfected the art of flirting while selling and selling by flirting.

“It's really marvelous what you can do in this world with a streamlined torso and a brilliant smile,” one Charmer told him. “People do things for me, especially men when I give them that slow smile and look up through my lashes. I found that out long ago.”

It is difficult to tell whether she is talking about picking up a date or attracting a customer—what exactly the “things” she wants from men are. Her desire to be desirable creates a feedback loop. “I spend most of my salary on dresses which accentuate all my good points,” she confesses. “After all, a girl should capitalize on what she has, shouldn't she? You'll find the answer in my commission every week.”

*   *   *

Today it is a commonplace that “sex sells.” The Shopgirl pioneered the practice of activating sexual desire in order to make consumers want to buy anything and everything—whether or not a given product has anything to do with sex. She was the predecessor to the models who posed in a bikini next to 1950s sports cars, and the women who winked
You've come a long way, baby
in the 1960s Virginia Slims ads while cheekily tonguing their cigarettes. Her sales floor flirtations paved the way for the Herbal Essences commercials, where women cry out in orgasm at the scent of their shampoo, and the Perrier spots in which the voluptuous burlesque star Dita Von Teese pours sparkling water over her breasts.

As women went to work as salesgirls, they mobilized the primal forces of attraction and the new rituals of courtship in order to drive shopping habits. Like latter-day, better-dressed Midases, they turned romantic longing into longing for consumer products. They performed this magic on customers, and they did it to themselves.

As economic activity—buying and selling things—became eroticized, so, too, did erotic and romantic life seem to require more work. Both their jobs and dating required the same kind of work.

Not only did they toil to earn the money to buy clothes and products and maintain stringent diets and elaborate beauty regimens. Women also had to work on their feelings. The most important part of a waitress or shopgirl's job was to
seem
a certain way. This meant expressing some emotions while repressing others. It meant being able to smile even when you felt low. It meant acting friendly toward all your customers without actually making friends with any of them. And it meant not getting angry when they behaved badly.

At work, as in dating, it was crucial not to be too spontaneous. “Many salesgirls are quite aware of the difference between what they really think of the customer and how they must act toward her,” Mills wrote. “The smile behind the counter is a commercialized lure … ‘Sincerity' is detrimental to one's job.”

In the 1980s, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined a term for the kind of efforts that the salesgirls were expending when they cast slow smiles and batted their eyelashes across the selling floor: “emotional labor
.
” Hochschild defined emotional labor as work that required workers to manage their feelings in order to display particular emotions. We speak of “service with a smile,” but in many jobs, the smile
is
the service, or at least the most important part of it. Today, more and more of us sell these kinds of feelings—from the stockbrokers who hype a stock to clients, to the personal trainers who cajole them into working out, from call center receptionists who calm down customers to bill collectors who terrorize them, from baristas to brand managers. In an age where very few Americans make a living making anything, dating trains us for our careers, and vice versa.

In work and love, we sell ourselves in order to sell what we are selling. We strive to become the way we want to come across. We are all Shopgirls now. We enjoy the pleasures the first Shopgirls enjoyed and we run the risk they ran: that our efforts do more for consumption than for courtship. For all our
likes
, we get too little love.

 

CHAPTER 3.
OUTS

Shopgirls knew that dressing and speaking the right ways would help them get a job, and that the right job could help them find a man. People who did not want what authorities said they should used many of the same tactics. They, too, chose clothing and gestures to express their desires.

Around 1900, the German Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld received a letter at his practice in Berlin. Hirschfeld was gaining an international reputation for defending the rights of men who had “female spirits” and women who had “male” ones. The letter came from a Jenny O. in San Francisco. The law said Jenny was a man. She said she was a woman and preferred to wear women's clothing. But she did so only at home. Jenny had been arrested once for the crime of “masquerading in feminine attire.” She dreaded its happening again.

“Only because of the arbitrary actions of the police do I wear men's clothing outside the house,” she wrote. “Skirts are sanctuary to me.”

Hirschfeld was one of the first advocates of “coming out.” He argued that if several thousand prominent homosexuals would only reveal themselves to the police, they would blaze the way to strike down laws that criminalized them. Public opinion was sure to follow.

Hirschfeld later traveled to the United States and photographed Jenny O. When his study
Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress
came out in 1910, it included four images of her, both clothed and naked. These now look like proud declarations. But Jenny O. knew that she was lucky that the book was published only in German. A person who appeared in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex” could easily end up in jail—and all over the yellow press.

As dating ceased to be seen as a form of vice and became the main way that young people expected to find partners, cities filled with venues to go out to. But the mainstreaming of dating also drew lines between who was “out” and who was “in.”

Some likes were more important than others. According to the magazines and books and movies that were canonizing the laws of dating, only some people could participate. This has remained true for a long time—even if the best dates seem to take place at the margins.

*   *   *

What is it about
out
?

Even now, in an age when a smartphone can pipe countless prospects into your pocket, “going out” still plays a key role in how we think of dating. After the end of a long relationship, friends soon urge you to “get back out” and “put yourself back out there.” If you have no one to take you, some say, go alone. Who knows? You might meet someone. You can get “asked out” when you are already there.

Couples who go out for a long time and then move in together are told that they must continue to schedule nights out with their friend groups, and “date nights” with each other. Leaving behind the drudgery of the home where you wash dishes or fix radiators or raise kids lets you rediscover the spark that made you want to live together in the first place. In 2012, the National Marriage Project, a conservative think tank at the University of Virginia, released a study showing that scheduling at least one date night per week was one of the most statistically significant predictors of marital satisfaction. Going out lets longtime partners feel briefly mysterious to one another again.

Yet the reason to go out is not necessarily to seek or strengthen a cohabiting relationship. When you are out, you can seek anything. Samuel Chotzinoff said that growing up in the tenements of New York's Lower East Side around 1900, immigrants like him could find privacy only in public. Being out among strangers not only lets you feel anonymous. It also can create moments of serendipity.