the twentieth century, Jewish women played a disproportionate role in the development of American consumer culture because of a combination of factors. For one, American industry became increasingly consumer-oriented, and consumer industries were comparatively open to small entrepreneurs
. For another, Jewish
immigrants and their children tended to display strong entrepreneurial tendencies.
One of the most significant shifts in American business took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of the “modern corporation,” which sought to attract and retain consumers through new forms of packaging, marketing, and advertising. These decades also witnessed the rise of the great department stores and mail-order companies. In addition, whole new consumer industries developed rapidly after the 1870s, particularly cosmetics, women’s ready-made clothing, and resorts. Unlike certain other fields, such as packaged foods, which were dominated by several huge firms, these new areas remained open to entrepreneurs
with limited capital.
Underlying all of these specific business developments was the nation’s
preeminence as a consumer-oriented economy and society. The constantly
increasing demand of a rapidly growing and comparatively affluent population
made the United States
a mecca for enterprising merchants and manufacturers. As elsewhere, Jews in America were disproportionately involved in commercial pursuits, ranging from clothing to furniture to real estate to movies. One of the outstanding features of the populous Jewish neighborhoods in New York City during the great era of immigration was the corresponding density of retail stores of all types. As well, street markets
in these neighborhoods
became so sophisticated that they sold specialized luxuries such as fur coats. While the great majority of merchants and entrepreneurs
were men, Jewish women
gained an unusual entree into this field of activity. There were two essential
reasons for their participation. First, Jewish women traditionally had been
more involved in commerce than women of most other groups. It is significant
that the well-known and often repeated passage from Proverbs about the “Woman
of Valor” depicts a wife and mother who buys vineyards while keeping her family
properly fed, clothed, and nurtured. Whereas most ethnic groups had fairly
conservative views about the propriety of women being involved in the public
sphere, Jews seemed to accept an extraordinary degree of female participation
in political, organizational, economic, intellectual, and public leisure
activities. Thus, the idea of women being active in the selling of goods did
not threaten Jewish sensibility and customs. In fact, the important role of
women in commerce, which seemed to persist in Eastern Europe,
increased during periods of economic duress. During the period of mass
emigration, eyewitness accounts of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement
attested that women were frequently involved in trade. Second, Jewish women seemed to be particularly responsive to the sophisticated new material world they discovered in America. The turn-of-the-century New York Yiddish press abounded with references to the enthusiasm of Jewish women, even the newly arrived, for the latest styles of dress and interior decoration. Furthermore, there were certain clear contrasts between Jews and other groups in respect to the consumption of goods. Advertisements of major American companies such as Borden’s and Nabisco appeared more rapidly in the Yiddish press than in the foreign-language newspapers of other immigrants, suggesting that these companies quickly identified Jews, and especially Jewish women, as a strong prospective market for national brands. This attraction to new kinds of products and pleasures also contributed to the rapid development of a resort
culture among Jews, which
set them apart not only from other immigrants but from virtually all Americans
of similarly modest means. From a combination of distinctive cultural,
economic, and social characteristics, therefore, Jewish women emerged as potent
agents of assimilation who identified the use of new products as an important
way of participating in American life. Published research on women in American business
is still scarce. As a
result, many commercial ventures by Jewish women throughout the twentieth
century have barely been traced. Given that some of the most famous
businesswomen, such as Jennie Grossinger
and Helena Rubinstein,
have not yet been treated by scholarly biographies, it is not surprising that
women of regional reputation–owners of retail stores, restaurants, and inns, as well as
caterers of kosher and other
foods–remain obscure or unknown in the historical record.
Since the colonial period, Jewish women in America
have done business as small-scale merchants and proprietors, and as
manufacturers of light consumer goods both on the frontier and in the big
cities. A number of them achieved major regional reputations, such as Beatrice Fox
Auerbach, who headed the G. Fox & Co. department store of
Hartford (dubbed the “Center of Connecticut Living Since 1847”) from 1938 to
1965, Rose Blumkin, owner of Nebraska Furniture Mart of Omaha from 1937 to
1983, and Hannah Levy, co-owner of Denver’s Fashion Bar chain of clothing
stores from 1933 through the 1980s. Others represented significant successes in
American business, such as Sylvia Weinberger, who produced and distributed
kosher chopped liver throughout the Northeast from 1955 to 1989, and
particularly Tillie Lewis (originally Myrtle Ehrlich), who introduced the
Italian pomodoro tomato to California in the 1930s and owned and operated a
major canning business until 1966. The focus of the following survey, however, will be on women
of national reputation in the marketing of nonedible consumer products or
services. In the fields of resorts, women’s wear, cosmetics, toys,
film-production, and advertising, Jewish women have stood among the nation’s
most significant entrepreneurs and executives. The fascination of New
York’s Jewish immigrants with the idea of the
vacation produced a rich resort life in the Catskill Mountains,
home to Grossinger’s, one of the country’s most renowned resorts. In the early
twentieth century, the Jewish vacation was viewed as an escape for mothers from
the drudgery of housekeeping in the congested immigrant city. Husbands
typically sent their wives and children to the mountains, joining them on
weekends. Given the strong female presence in the holiday settings, it is not
surprising that a woman rose to become the quintessential resort entrepreneur. Innkeeping was a common
occupation among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and the Galician-born Jennie
Grossinger had ancestors on both sides of her family who had served as
innkeepers or estate managers. Her development as an entrepreneur took place
within the framework of a family business that began in 1914 when the
Grossinger family bought a small farm in Ferndale,
New York, and opened a boardinghouse for
vacationing immigrants. By the late 1920s, situated on a new, larger property,
the successful Grossinger’s Hotel and Country Club included sixty-three acres
of woodland and a lake. In the highly personalized business of resort
proprietorship, Jennie Grossinger established herself not only as a capable
business manager, but more importantly as a hostess whose warmth and concern
for her guests’ comfort were instrumental in building up a loyal clientele over
the years. Taking charge of the family business
after her father’s death
in 1931, Grossinger produced the model of a total resort experience for the
average as well as the affluent consumer. From its early days, the complex
included a bath in every room, still a notable luxury in the 1920s, and a huge
dining room that seated four hundred. It also offered menu selections, a dance
band, camp activities for children, winter sports such as ice skating,
uniformed bellmen, and other amenities that would become standard in the area’s
hotels. To this enterprise,
Grossinger added a host of “extras,” including art classes, free honeymoons to
couples who had met at Grossinger’s, winter “reunions” of summer guests,
convention facilities, vacations donated to charities for raffle and door
prizes, and a constant circuit of talented and ultimately famous entertainers,
with the innovative practice of booking a different act every night.
Grossinger’s also became famous for its stable of professional athletes who
trained and gave lessons at the resort, including tennis star Jack Kramer and
swimming great Florence Chadwick. At its peak, Grossinger’s had 600 rooms, a
dining room that seated 1,700 people, two kitchens—one for meat and one for
dairy—a nightclub with two stages, a post office, an airport, a ski slope, an
Olympic-sized swimming pool, a golf course, and a riding academy, as well as a
space for Jewish and Christian religious services. Fittingly, its slogan was
“Grossinger’s Has Everything.” Although changing vacation patterns among
Americans would lead to the resort’s decline after the 1960s and its closing in
1986, Jennie Grossinger had presided over and personified the ultimate
democratic luxury resort of the early and mid-twentieth century With the notable exception of the Albert
Lasker Agency, Jews did not play a major role in the American
advertising industry until the second half of the twentieth century. In the
early 1900s, the most prominent Jewish woman in the ad business was Helen Woodward, who may have been the first
woman to serve as an account executive in the industry. Born in 1882 in New York City, she lived on the Upper
East Side until the family moved to Boston,
where she attended the Girls’ Latin School,
a college-preparatory public school. Her career in advertising started in 1903
with a clerical job in the Hampton Agency, a leader in the field. She gained
some experience writing advertising copy for a publishing company, and in 1908
began working for the Women’s Home Companion, one of the
biggest-circulation magazines of the day. For WHC
she inaugurated a “girls’ club” whose purpose was to sell subscriptions. Her
next job was a major promotional campaign for the Review of Reviews,
writing the advertising for the first published volumes of Matthew Brady’s
Civil War photos. In 1912, she went to work for the Presbrey Advertising
Agency, one of the premier agencies in the nation. This was an achievement, for
the few women who worked as ad copywriters in those years were
employed by department stores, not agencies. At Presbrey, she was put in charge
of the Review of Reviews account, and created a new style of copywriting
for books, emphasizing their content rather than their binding and external
appearance. She used this approach to launch O. Henry’s collections of short
stories just before World War I. She married writer and historian William
Woodward in 1913 and retired from the advertising business in 1923, spending
the next four decades as a free-lance writer. Her pioneering role in the
advertising business had a large impact, for the autobiographical account of
her career, Through Many Windows (1926), was widely referred to by
vocational counselors as a model for aspiring young women. In the post-World War II period, the most significant woman in American advertising was Shirley Polykoff, whose career involved both the shift toward hair-dyeing and the candid exaltation of blondeness that marked the consumer taste of American women between the 1950s and 1970s. Long fascinated by advertisements, which she believed served as models of American life for immigrants, the Brooklyn-born Polykoff started out as a copywriter for a local women’s specialty shop in the 1920s, and moved on to hold the top fashion-writing job in Bamberger’s and Kresge’s department stores in Newark, New Jersey. In the 1940s, Polykoff, who retained her maiden name in business, wrote ads for the Frederick-Clinton Agency, specializing in copy for women’s shoes but also producing the renowned musical advertisement “Chock Full o’ Nuts, the heavenly coffee.” By 1955, she had built up an impressive résumé, which attracted an offer from the prestigious agency Foote, Cone & Belding. Within her first few days, Polykoff was given a new account
, that of the fledgling
Clairol company, for which she created the famous “Does She Or Doesn’t She?”
slogan. The Clairol campaign was almost a test case for advertising methods
because the idea of hair-dyeing was not socially acceptable. Polykoff’s
ingenious campaign centered on a mother-and-child motif in order to nullify any
connotations of cheapness or promiscuity that might be associated with the
product. Within a few years, the percentage of women using hair colorings rose
from about seven percent to about fifty percent. In the 1950s and 1960s, Polykoff created several other memorable slogans for Clairol products: “Is it true blondes have more fun?”, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”, and “The closer he gets, the better you look!” The television ad for “The closer he gets” campaign, which showed a young couple running to meet each other across a distance and culminated with the man picking up the woman, had a large impact on other campaigns and entered the popular culture as a cliché of the romantic encounter. Her final Clairol slogan, created just before her retirement from Foote, Cone & Belding in 1973, was “To know you’re the best you can be.” Reflecting the rise of feminism and the end of the “Does She Or Doesn’t She” era, it too became a classic that reverberated through American culture. Recognized with two “firsts” at the International
Film Festivals in Cannes
and Venice, Polykoff was the highest-paid employee and senior vice president at
Foote, Cone & Belding, as well as the first living woman elected to the
American Advertising Hall of Fame. She enjoyed a final decade of success as
head of her own advertising agency, retiring in 1984. Polykoff died in 1998. Like the kosher resort business, the women’s
clothing and cosmetic industries in America
were born during the period of mass migration from Eastern Europe.
Similarly, they offered Jewish women entrepreneurial opportunities based on
both the female orientation and the newness of the field. The innovations of
businesswomen in clothing and cosmetics generally consisted of creative
combinations of marketing and product creation. One of the most significant innovations in women’s clothing during the twentieth century was the modern brassiere, whose development and marketing
owed much to the
initiative of Ida Cohen
Rosenthal. Like Grossinger, Ida Cohen grew up in a family that
supported itself by running a business, in this case a general store that her
mother operated in a shtetl near
Minsk (Russian Poland). She
immigrated to America
in 1905, and within a decade emerged as a successful dressmaker in Hoboken,
New Jersey, and later in Manhattan.
In 1921, she made the bold stroke of creating a partnership with an English
high-fashion designer, Enid Bissett. Unhappy with the defeminizing styles of
the decade, Rosenthal and Bissett, with the assistance of Ida’s husband,
William Rosenthal, concentrated on making a brassiere that would fit rather
than constrict the bosom. The simple cotton bra they created was initially
marketed as a free bonus to accompany every dress
purchased. Quickly, however, demand stimulated the trio to form the Maiden Form
Brassiere Company in 1923. After 1929, the flapper disappeared and the urban vogue returned to a fuller, more feminine look, which was propitious for Maidenform sales. The support bra also acquired new appeal when women were called to work in heavy industry during World War II. In addition to bras, the company began manufacturing girdles, lingerie, and swimwear, and it would ultimately become one of the nation’s largest makers of women’s foundation garments. In the postwar era, the company reached new heights of marketing with one of the best-known advertising campaigns of the time. In one of a series of similar ads, a vital young woman dressed in a bra and boxing shorts
appears with the slogan “I
dreamed I was a knockout in my Maidenform bra.” Although she was the force
behind the company’s effective marketing strategies, Rosenthal became chair of
Maidenform only after her husband’s death in 1958, and she continued to
supervise retail sales until her own death fifteen years later. In contrast to the immigrant-based experience of Rosenthal, who started out working as a dressmaker, the most conspicuous Jewish women in the post-World War II clothing industry entered as designers or purchasing agents, many of whom were college educated. The career of Linda Wachner provides an illustration. Born in 1946, the daughter of a New York fur salesman and a homemaker, Wachner graduated from the University of Buffalo and went immediately into retail buying, working in the 1970s as a bra-and-girdle buyer for Macy’s. Success in this arena led to a series of executive positions. Wachner became a vice president of Warnaco’s lingerie division and then made a dramatic move to Max Factor, where, as president of the U.S. division, she restored a flagging business in a five-year period (1979-1984). In 1986, she and a partner engineered a hostile takeover of the Warnaco Group, Inc., which controlled a large share of the women’s undergarment market, including such prestigious brands as Warner’s, Olga, Valentino, Scaasi, Ungaro, Bob Mackie, and Fruit of the Loom. Emerging as chairperson, president, and CEO of Warnaco, Wachner became one of the highest-paid and most powerful businesswomen in America in the 1990s. Her success as an executive was based not only on her driving ambition but also on her keen marketing
sense, renowned within the
industry. The careers of Ida Rosenthal and Linda Wachner show something of the generational difference among Jewish entrepreneurs
, and a parallel is found
in the fashion business. Estelle Sommers,
the founder of the Capezio brand of dance wear, and designer Anne Klein both
came of age before World War II and went directly into business without a
college education. Sommers started out as a small-scale proprietor, opening a
dance-supply store in Cincinnati
that she transformed in the 1960s into the Manhattan-based Capezio
Dance-Theater Shops. Anne Klein, whose original name was Hannah Golofski,
started her career at age fifteen with a job as a free-lance sketcher at a New
York wholesale house. After the war, she formed a company with her first
husband, Ben Klein, designing and marketing junior clothes. She won
acclaim for pioneering the change in junior-sized garments from traditionally
frilly styles to a sleeker, more sophisticated look. In 1968, she formed Anne
Klein and Company and continued to distinguish herself as an innovator,
producing high-style casual wear for women and packaging her designs in
interchangeable parts that the customer could arrange to make an outfit. At the
time of her death in 1974, her clothing lines ranked among the finest in the
country. In stark contrast to Sommers and Klein, the most important Jewish women in the post-World War II clothing industry—Diane von Furstenberg
and Donna Karan—represented
the affluent background of the postwar generation.
They entered a fashion business that was already highly developed, and made
significant innovations attuned to a new generation’s demand for both
professional wear and more sophisticated leisure wear. Both women were born
after World War II, both attended college, and both had careers marked by
high-powered entrances into the fashion marketplace. Von Furstenberg (born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin), a Belgian, strode into the field in 1970 when she unveiled a distinctive collection to rave reviews by the New York press. Within a few months of opening her Seventh Avenue showroom in 1972, her company was earning wholesale revenues of $1.2 million. Five years later, her clothing line and “signature” accessories were earning a gross income of over $142 million. Having licensed her name to a number of manufacturers, she withdrew from the fashion business in 1983, only to return in 1990 out of disappointment with the products that were bearing her signature. Her marketing
success quickly resumed,
with new lines of clothing priced for the average consumer and a new emphasis
on factory-to-customer marketing and on products for the Avon
direct-marketing company. Von Furstenberg’s name was one of the most well-known
in the fashion industry. She was noted for producing simple yet elegant
wraparound dresses and shirtwaists at a time when the women’s market had few
attractive alternatives to either the highly informal styles of the youth
culture or the formalwear of the elite. The daughter of a custom tailor and a fashion model, Donna Karan entered the fashion business as an assistant to Anne Klein. After Klein died in 1974, Karan developed a reputation for herself by sustaining the Anne Klein label. In 1985, Karan started her own company, designing comfortable, feminine clothes for executives. The collection was immediately successful, and Karan boosted her reputation further in 1989 by launching an even more popular, moderately priced line, DKNY (Donna Karan New York). Karan’s merchandise was noteworthy for departing from the male-styled executive suits that had initially accompanied women into the business and professional worlds. More than most designers, Karan maintained close contact with all phases of product development
and attributed her success
in part to the fact that she made clothes with an ordinary woman’s body, rather
than a model’s, in mind. Her extraordinary ability to produce fashionable,
functional, and boldly feminine outfits led one industry analyst to state that
Karan was “the only world-class woman designer this country has developed.” Perhaps
even more dramatically than in the clothing business, Jewish women have played
an outstanding role in the development of the cosmetics industry. The names of Helena
Rubinstein and Estee Lauder became
virtual synonyms for cosmetics in twentieth-century America.
The bold careers of these entrepreneurs reflected the burgeoning
of an immense new industry. Their immigrant backgrounds proved significant, for
both started out in business with a product from the world of their European
Jewish relatives. Rubinstein was born in Cracow, Poland, the daughter of a prosperous wholesale food broker
. Her mother had a strong
interest in feminine beauty, and gave Helena
important lessons about preserving the health of one’s skin. Even more critical
to Rubinstein’s career was the moisturizing cream her mother obtained from a
chemist named Jacob Lykusky for the use of her family. When she left home to
live with relatives in Australia,
Rubinstein took twelve pots of Lykusky’s face cream with her. In Australia’s
dry climate, Rubinstein’s cream quickly became popular, and in 1902 she opened
a beauty salon in Melbourne. The
salon was unique because it not only marketed skin cream but also provided
consultations on skin care and beauty. The extraordinary success of this salon
allowed Rubinstein to leave Australia
for Europe in 1904 with one hundred thousand dollars in
profits, which she would invest in salons in both London
(1908) and Paris (1912). She left
the Melbourne business in the hands
of two of her sisters, a practice she would continue with her European salons
when she immigrated with her husband and two children to the United
States in 1915. By this time, she had
already pioneered the modern, full-fledged cosmetics salon, which included such
innovations as treatments for skin marred by acne and on-site professional
massages as a beauty service. Rubinstein perceived the American market as huge in potential, not only because of its size and affluence, but also because the restraint and modesty of American women, compared to Rubinstein’s European clients, was about to give way to much more sophisticated habits. By 1917, she had established salons in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia, starting with the City of Paris store in San Francisco. One of the marketing innovations she introduced in America was the sale of her products in department stores. This created yet another precedent-setting change: personal training of department store clerks by Rubinstein herself, who was concerned about maintaining a high quality of service to the customer. In-store training of clerks would become a basic marketing feature in the cosmetics industry, as would Rubinstein’s use of women as traveling sales representatives to demonstrate products in local stores. Rubinstein was also responsible for introducing a complex level of specialization into the cosmetics field. During her European period, she received fairly extensive training in the chemistry of skin lotions and employed many chemists, dermatologists, and other specialists throughout her career. Her company marketed hundreds of new beauty and medicinal products. Emphasizing diet, exercise, and massage as well as cosmetic treatments, Rubinstein originated the “total” approach to beauty and conceived of her work as having a scientific foundation. Her international success made her one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs
of the twentieth century.
After her death, control of the company passed to Rubinstein’s niece Mala
Rubinstein. Careful to conceal her birthdate, Estee Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer sometime before World War I, the child of affluent Central European Jews who had settled in Corona, New York. From early childhood, Lauder was interested in beauty and skin care. Her mother’s brother, who was a skin specialist, brought with him from Europe a special recipe for skin cream, and he taught Lauder how to make it in a laboratory constructed in a stable behind the Mentzer house. The young Estee launched her career by marketing
this cream through
Florence Morris’s beauty salon on the Upper East Side.
It was here that she first jarred and labeled the cream with her own name, and
created a line of face powder, lipstick, and eyeshadow. In addition to selling
these products, she did makeup on customers while they were waiting for their
hair to dry. Intent on expanding as rapidly as possible, Lauder opened up and
hired staff for makeup counters at other locations, including hotels and
resorts on Long Island. Her business began its
spectacular climb in 1946, when Saks Fifth Avenue
ordered and quickly sold out a large shipment of Lauder cosmetics. A tireless
marketer, Lauder toured the country visiting both large and small department
stores, where she set up counters, trained clerks, and established a rigorous
policy of personal appearance and service among them. She also spent time
persuading personnel in women’s departments to steer customers to her beauty
counter. She placed samples with fashion and beauty editors of local newspapers
and magazines, and personally guided the print and broadcast advertising of her
new concessions. In this period of expansion, Lauder used a number of marketing
techniques that ultimately became conventions in the industry: giveaway
samples, gifts-with-purchase, and direct mailings of invitations to women to
visit the Lauder counter. In 1953, Lauder began selling Youth Dew, a bold
fragrance that marked the company’s entrance into the perfume business and that
earned more than $150 million by 1985. By 1995, Estee Lauder, Inc., was
registering annual sales of $2.9 billion and commanding about forty percent of
the upscale cosmetics market. One of the firm’s critical successes was the 1968 introduction of the 117-product Clinique line
of fragrance-free,
allergy-tested cosmetics. Clinique was promoted by means of an innovative
in-house advertising campaign, headed by a former editor of Vogue who
had been lured away from the magazine to serve as Lauder’s advertising chief.
Creating a new look in cosmetics advertising, the ads featured “still-life”
photographs of Clinique bottles next to a glass with a toothbrush in it,
underlined by the caption “Twice A Day.” The stark ads, noteworthy for their
lack of female models and references to age or life-style, fit Lauder’s concept
of the product line as one that was
scientifically developed to suit the skin of anybody at any age. Even after Lauder’s death in 2004, Estee Lauder, Inc., has remained essentially a family business
, with Lauder’s two sons
and several grandchildren and other relatives inducted into executive positions.
