Beatrice Fox Auerbach at her desk at G. Fox. Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford.
Among the long list of Don Draper’s romantic conquests in the television series Mad Men, Rachel Menken, the savvy, beautiful president of Menken’s department store, stood out. Driven and ambitious, she charmed Don with her intelligence and witty banter, even as she commanded a conference room full of ego-driven madmen in designer suits. Rachel, who broke it off with the infamously desirable Casanova, is often cited as “the one who got away,” and even earned her own thread on Reddit, “Don Draper’s True Love?”
Rachel’s real-life inspiration was Beatrice Fox Auerbach, an even more impressive woman when it came to running the country’s largest family-owned department store, albeit, perhaps, without the same movie star looks. Like Rachel, Beatrice was Jewish and single when she took over the store from her father, following his death in 1938. (Unlike Rachel, Beatrice was widowed with two children, and many surmised that, while not exactly dating Don Draper types, Beatrice did have a romantic relationship with her lawyer.)
Menken’s department store was a stand-in for G. Fox, a staple of Connecticut life for more than a century. G. Fox was founded by Beatrice’s grandfather Gershon in 1848, but it was his granddaughter who transformed it into one of America’s most successful stores. When not walking the aisles wearing white gloves, swiping the underside of counters, and running her finger along shelves to check for dust, Beatrice sat on a raised stool in her office, placing low chairs for guests, to obscure the fact that she stood barely five feet tall. Fastidious and tough, “Mrs. Auerbach brooks no opposition,” wrote the publisher Bennett Cerf, “she doesn’t even recognize it. When she sails through her domain, even the steel girders tremble slightly.”
Beatrice claimed a number of firsts. During the Great Depression, when companies regularly fired married women employees, Beatrice not only hired them but also frequently promoted them. In fact, G. Fox did not let go of a single worker during the entire period of economic depression. In 1942, she again broke with precedent by employing African Americans in sales positions and management roles. “G. Fox is one of the few department stores in the United States where a Negro employee may say with quiet confidence, ‘‘I’m working hard for the next step up,” wrote Marjorie Greene in the magazine Opportunity in 1948. That year, G. Fox had 2,500 employees, 250 of whom were Black, working in sales, as telephone dispatchers, clerks, gift wrappers, seamstresses, floor stock handlers, and elevator operators. Lester Holmes was an African American former Gl who was hired to handle warehouse stock and was eventually promoted to head of the department that sold sheets and blankets. Anaretha Shaw, a Black mother of six, was a personnel counselor, responsible for recruiting and hiring G. Fox employees. When she resigned, Sarah Murphy, a Black major in the Women’s Army Corps and a graduate of New York University’s personnel administration program, replaced her. While Sarah was trained in personnel work, she wasn’t familiar with retail selling, so as part of her introduction to the store G. Fox made her a saleswoman in the lingerie department. That was particularly notable, because lingerie departments rarely hired Black sales staff, on the assumption that white customers would object to Black employees handling their intimates. The National Urban League recognized Beatrice’s efforts, and the NAACP gave her a lifetime membership.
“She was a tiny little thing. Very petite and thin, almost fragile,” said Janet Cramer, who worked at G. Fox while in high school in the early 1960s. Her jobs were in the swimsuit department (it was awful telling women they looked good when they didn’t), jewelry (she was relocated after making a billing mistake), and the Russell Stover chocolate counter (her favorite). Janet was the recipient of a scholarship from Beatrice to attend the University of Connecticut’s pediatric nursing program, and she visited her boss’s office for the first and only time to thank her. “She was proud that she could help a nice Jewish girl like me become a nurse,” Janet recalled of the conversation. A few years after Janet left for nursing school, Beatrice decided to sell G. Fox to the May department store chain for $41 million, or more than $380 million in today’s dollars. When news of the sale broke, Beatrice said she would give most of the money away. “One thing you can be certain of is that I won’t be spending it on yachts and horses,” she quipped.
“Mrs. Auerbach brooks no opposition,” wrote the publisher Bennett Cerf, “she doesn’t even recognize it. When she sails through her domain, even the steel girders tremble slightly.”
The Jewish community had a long, storied history in the retail industry. Numerous Jewish immigrants from Germany, eastern Europe, and elsewhere arrived in America at the turn of the nineteenth century, presiding over stores that became household names. In New York, there was Isidor Straus and his brother Nathan, Joseph Bloomingdale and his brother Lyman, and Horace Saks and his cousin Bernard Gimbel. From F&R Lazarus, to Kaufmann’s, to Neiman Marcus, Jewish merchants became well known throughout the country. Jewish women were also merchants, many of whom worked at these early stores and carved out careers in sales and advertising, and some, like Beatrice, either inherited leadership roles or founded stores themselves.
Mary Ann Cohen was the Dutch-born daughter of a rabbi. She married the Englishman Isaac Magnin at age fifteen, and the couple had eight children. Mary Ann and her brood immigrated to America in the early 1870s and headed straight for San Francisco. There, Isaac got a job at Gump’s, a department store, and Mary Ann opened her own small shop out of the family’s home, where she used her sewing skills to create lingerie for the wealthy ladies of Nob Hill. Mary Ann’s offerings became so popular that she soon expanded to bridal gowns and baby clothes, ordering lace and linen from Europe. Although her merchandise was expensive, she did a brisk business with the help of the city’s carriage trade, and by 1880, Mary Ann had her own store in downtown San Francisco. She named it I. Magnin, after her husband.
When the 1906 earthquake destroyed the city, I. Magnin was leveled along with the rest of downtown, but a large loan enabled the family to rebuild, and by 1912 the store was doing so well that it expanded into its first branch location. I. Magnin specialized in high-end goods, from $500 day dresses to $5,000 evening gowns. One customer placed a $25,000 order for dresses every year — over the phone. Another flew to San Francisco to have her measurements taken, then asked that every Norman Norell – designed gown with sequins be sent to her by mail. For the first three years, the I. Magnin buyer sent her dresses and in return received effusive thank-you notes. But then, suddenly, the customer stopped writing. The buyer continued to send the sequined gowns and continued to receive checks for the dresses, but there was no comment as to whether the customer liked the buyer’s selections. Several years later, the buyer finally discovered the reason. He was in the customer’s hometown when he bumped into her at a dinner party. She had put on weight since they had first met, and decided it was easier to pay thousands of dollars for the dresses every year than to write back and admit she was now two sizes larger.
By the turn of the century, Mary Ann’s sons, but not her daughters, joined her in business. Still, the aging matriarch had no intention of retiring. Mary Ann continued working at the store, arriving each afternoon at 3:00 for her daily inspection, even after she was confined to a wheelchair, until she died at age ninety-four, in 1943. One son, Joseph, did break away from the family after falling in love with a millinery worker at the store, refusing to abide by his mother’s rule that family members not fraternize with the staff. Joseph married her, then opened a competing store nearby, the Joseph Magnin Company, which became famous for handling the 1967 trousseau of the presidential daughter Lynda Bird Johnson.
Another Jewish female merchant of renown was Lena Himmelstein, the creator of Lane Bryant. Lena did not have very auspicious beginnings: her parents died in a pogrom in their Lithuanian village just days after she was born, in 1879. Her grandparents raised Lena before shipping her off to America at age sixteen. She was booked on a passage accompanied by distant relatives, but no one informed her that she was making the transatlantic journey for the express purpose of marrying the family’s homely son upon landing in New York. Lena refused to go along with the scheme and instead joined her sister, who was already living in New York, and got a job as a seamstress in a sweatshop for $1 a week. At age twenty, in 1899, Lena finally chose to marry, but her husband, David Bryant, a Brooklyn jeweler, died of tuberculosis soon after their first child was born. All of the couple’s money had been spent on her husband’s illness, and the only thing left of value was a pair of diamond earrings that he had given Lena as a wedding gift. With little choice, Lena pawned the diamond earrings to make a down payment on a sewing machine and began to sew negligees and tea gowns to support herself and her infant son. She earned a loyal following of customers, and she was successful enough that in 1904 she opened a store on upper Fifth Avenue in Harlem, the sign on the door reading “Bridle Shop.” The error was thanks to an illiterate sign painter — the store specialized in bridal gowns, not headgear for horses.
While Lena had racked up misfortunes, some of her trials turned fortuitous. Another spelling mistake would ignite her career. While she was running her small store, in 1907, a customer requested an outfit she could wear while pregnant, and Lena fashioned one of her tea gowns with an accordion-pleated skirt to camouflage her belly. Instead of a belt, she attached the skirt to the bodice with an elastic band. The dress caught on, and Lena was soon inundated with orders. Excited by her success in originating what would become the maternity wear market, Lena was quickly scribbling a deposit slip at the bank one day, when she transposed two of the letters of her name into “Lane.” At first, she was too embarrassed to correct the misspelling, but then she realized how much she liked it. When her success with maternity wear enabled her to move to larger quarters on West Thirty-Eighth Street, the sign she hung above the door read “Lane Bryant.”
While Lena’s company was booming with its maternity line, the new market was not without its challenges. Most significantly, newspapers held to prudish rules that forbade advertisements for maternity wear, deeming it unseemly. In 1911, The New York Herald finally broke with precedent, and after advertising, Lena saw her sales double within the year. “It is no longer the fashion nor the practice for expectant mothers to stay in seclusion,” read an early Lane Bryant advertisement. “Doctors, nurses and psychologists agree that at this time a woman should think and live as normally as possible.… Lane Bryant has originated maternity apparel in which the expectant mother may feel as other women feel because she looks as other women look.”
By then, Lena had married for a second time, to a mechanical engineer, Albert Malsin. He began managing his wife’s business and persuaded the manufacturers along Seventh Avenue to mass-produce her designs. Albert also started an enormously successful Lane Bryant mail-order catalog and helped pioneer ready-to-wear clothing for “women of larger proportions.” As an engineer, Albert had a knack for numbers, and he and Lena studied insurance company reports and used a special yardstick that Albert had invented, and that conformed to the angles of the body, to examine more than forty-five hundred of Lane Bryant’s customers’ figures. Lane Bryant began creating inclusive sizes, and by 1923 the company had reached $5 million in sales in those sizes alone, or $85 million in today’s dollars. In 1915, it opened its first branch retail store in Chicago. In 1947, Lane Bryant announced the opening of a flagship store at Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street. “It’s a miracle, and yet I suppose it’s a typical American success story, too,” said Lena.
Julie Satow is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Plaza, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and NPR Favorite Book of 2019. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times.