They Revolutionized Shopping, With Tea Sandwiches on the Side

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WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, by Julie Satow In 1980, Donald J. Trump made the front page of The New York Times after assaulting a pair of scantily clad women at a Fifth Avenue department store. That the women were made of stone and were attached to the building of Bonwit Teller, in the process of being razed and replaced by Trump Tower, was of little comfort to the trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had been promised these Art Deco bas-relief beauties — long hovering over pedestrians, now shattered. The sculptures’ significance was allegorical as well as architectural: Department stores, though erected mostly by men, have always been feminine domains. “The Ladies’ Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set at a store modeled after Le Bon Marché, still standing in Paris despite the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith framed her 1952 lesbian romance “The Price of Salt” at the fictional Frankenberg’s, based on Bloomingdale’s. Now Julie Satow has written a group biography of the department-store doyennes who ran the show — and these places in their heyday really were a form of theater — for the male founders and owners whose names adorned the facades.