Racked: Department stores are basically the reason women were allowed in public

She was dumped on her butt at the door. Rebecca Israel walked into the red marble dining room of Café Boulevard, a restaurant in the Lower East Side’s Jewish theater pocket, hoping to try some of the paprika chicken that a New York guide recommended. Instead, she was politely but firmly tossed out onto the street. The year was 1900, and unescorted women weren’t allowed into the domain of men — or as we like to call it today, “the public” — and certainly not in a place where said men could huddle together, talk business, and hobnob over cigars and brandy.

In 1899, two Philadelphians visited Manhattan for a weekend trip, where they learned the hard way that a woman wasn’t allowed to dine in a restaurant past 6 without a man’s reservation at the door. Stubborn, they plucked a random messenger boy from the street and had him join them at their table. Then there was the mother-daughter duo who came into a restaurant to get out of the pouring rain, but before they had a chance to shake out their skirts, the owner had them by the elbows and was kicking them out, muttering about indecency.

What did all these women have in common? They were barging into men’s territory, which happened to be, well, anywhere outside. The world was split into two spheres during the Victorian era, and those boundaries were ironclad and “naturally ordained”: men owned city centers, women owned drawing rooms, and with it came a power imbalance that was thought of as necessary to keep social order tidy.

Read the full story on Racked.