Abstract
In this article, I would like to examine the process by which women salesclerks took a firm hold on the sales floors in department stores in prewar days. For this purpose, I analyzed women salesclerks in the Mitsukoshi Department Store. The main reason for assigning women to sales is that women can give soft responses. Such a sexual division of labor in the company has been formed over a long time. Jobs for women salesclerks expanded because not only were their wages low, but their characteristics were rated as high. On the other hand, their selling skills were standardized by new forms of salesclerk training.
The first chapter presents the attributes and the positions that women salesclerks had in the department. When a woman was first employed as a salesclerk in a department store, she was employed as permanent staff. Since a married woman had to give priority to domestic business, unmarried women in the new middle class who wished to work to prepare for married life, increased in the department store. Divided into management and selling, most of the women salesclerks had no opportunity for promotion.
The second chapter examines the changes in evaluations for women salesclerks. Since it was considered that women salesclerks did not have expert knowledge, they were assigned to simple jobs in the early 1900s. Having shifted from a store to a department store, the politeness of women salesclerks was rated highly. That was not only because they pursued mere rationality in the department store, but also because they considered the process of shopping important. Consequently, women salesclerks had been located on various sales floors at the end of the 1920s.
The third chapter describes the process by which women took a firm hold on the sales floor in department stores. In the 1930s, as department stores were popularized, there was an increase in women salesclerks who were inexperienced on the sales floor. Because of that, the department stores put more effort into salesclerk training. In the Mitsukoshi Department Store, they introduced salesclerk training using movies and photographs, and made women salesclerks study standardized communication skills. They did not so much apply the character of the woman salesclerk to sales as improve it for sales. Through such a process, women salesclerks came to occupy half or more of the sales floor.
