Gendered, aesthetic and emotional labour in Australian department stores across the twentieth century

This article examines the historical exploitation of female labour in Australian department stores. These stores extracted significant value through gendered, aesthetic, and emotional labour. Female employees were systematically underpaid in relation to male workers. They were expected to maintain appropriate and prescribed appearances, provide personalised customer service, and possess detailed product knowledge. Retailers worked hard to constrain wage growth: during progress towards equal pay legislation from the 1950s onwards, they deployed a range of strategies to minimise costs, including job reclassification and casualisation. This coincided with increasing feminisation of the workforce. The emergence of discount department stores employing labour-efficient, self-service models in the 1970s, further disrupted traditional department stores that relied on intensive customer service. By the 1990s, casualisation and part-time work had transformed the sector. The story of department stores has often been narrated in terms of male entrepreneurial drive and will. The business model, however, was fundamentally dependent on cheap, highly skilled female labour

Emotional labor · Media studies · Sociology · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Social Psychology