Street Names

Demorest Street

William Jennings Demorest, a crusading editor more deadly to the saloon than Carry Nation, ran for Mayor of New York on the temperance ticket and lectured on the evils of drink (and tea, coffee and ice cream).

His wife, Ellen Curtis Demorest, developed the tissue patterns that revolutionized dressmaking... Madame Demorest was one of the founders of Sorosis, the first organized woman's club; she chartered a clipper ship to bring tea from China to be sold by indigent women; and, it was whispered, she even believed in votes for women.

Linking self-interest with women's interests, this fashion entrepreneur/tea merchant democratized fashion and gave hundreds of women a respectable way to achieve economic independence.

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Ellen Curtis Demorest turned fashion into business and had an enormous impact on women's lives in the latter nineteenth century. "No woman in this country has done more than Mme. Demorest to secure the best interests of her sex," proclaimed one New York reporter in 1866. "She has proved, in her vast business transactions, the capacity of woman to care for herself; and she has been instrumental in placing many others on the path of prosperous trade which leads to independence."4

Born in Schuylerville, New York, the second of eight children, Ellen Curtis set her sights on becoming a milliner when she finished school at eighteen. Like dressmaking, millinery was work that offered young women independence and creativity; it was an acceptable female enterprise because it demanded the traditionally feminine skill of sewing and catered to a female clientele.

Curtis' father, a farmer who also owned a hat factory, helped her set up a shop in Saratoga Springs. Her venture was an immediate success and she took her business to Troy, a prospering millinery center where she studied dressmaking, and then to New York City, which in the 1850s was rapidly emerging as the center of the nation's developing garment industry. Through business connections, Curtis met her future husband, William Jennings Demorest, a dry goods merchant who had established a fashion emporium named Madame Demorest's after his first wife, but who was now bankrupt from the crash of 1857 - as well as a widower with two young children.

From emporium to empire

Ellen Curtis Demorest soon settled into her new roles as wife, mother (over the next few years she gave birth to two children), and the woman behind Madame Demorest's fashion emporium. At the emporium, Ellen, her sister, and a team of designers made expensive wardrobes for a wealthy clientele. Over the years, Ellen introduced several innovations: a corset widely hailed as the most comfortable available, a small hoop skirt that was easy to manage and inexpensive, lines of children's and men's clothing, and the Imperial Dress-elevator, an undergarment with strings women used to raise and lower their skirts as they cleared sidewalks, gutters, and puddles.

While Ellen developed a loyal New York City clientele, her husband introduced a women's fashion magazine, Mme. Demorest's Quarterly Mirror of Fashions, to market the clothing and reputation of Madame Demorest's well beyond New York. The magazine not only included the customary color plates of elegant women in fashionable attire; it provided its readers with another innovation, tissue-paper patterns of the fashions. In an era when women's clothing was complicated and elaborate, when the very cutting of a dress pattern was an intricate and difficult task, paper patterns were transforming the fashion industry. The Demorests' timing was perfect: Their launch into the paper pattern business occurred just as the sewing machine was becoming a common fixture in middle-class homes, making high style accessible to middle-class women.

Ellen gained widespread praise and publicity in 1863 when she designed the trousseau for the bride of P.T. Barnum's circus star, Tom Thumb. The following year William purchased the New York Illustrated News, merged it with the Mirror of Fashions, and created Demorest's Illustrated Monthly Magazine and Mme. Demorest's Mirror of Fashions. The new publication appeared monthly, cost three dollars per year, and included an engraving suitable for hanging and a package of patterns. Each issue arrived with a pattern inside. By the mid-1870s, the Demorests' business ventures had reached a peak: In 1876, they distributed three million paper patterns.

Improving lives through business

From the very beginning, the Demorests brought their reform zeal (in particular for temperance, abolition, and women's well-being) to their business. In the midst of the national crisis over slavery, for example, they hired African-American women and treated them as equals. All workers, regardless of race, sat together in the workroom, received the same pay, and were invited to the same company social events. If customers objected, no matter how wealthy or influential, the Demorests told them to go elsewhere.

The Demorests' business and reform interests became inextricably linked in 1860 when Demorest's Monthly became a vehicle to promote a range of causes on behalf of women. Chief writer Jennie June Croly's regular column, "What Women Are Doing," claimed to take "note of every women rancher, banker, dentist or businesswoman of any sort who came to light in a distinctive way in any part of the country."5 In 1868, Ellen Demorest and Croly founded Sorosis, the pioneering New York City woman's club. Demorest also became treasurer of the New York Medical College, a school dedicated to training women in homeopathic medicine, and board chairman of a temperance refuge in the city.

In 1872, Demorest combined her efforts on behalf of women with her own entrepreneurial spirit. With Susan A. King, a businesswoman who had made her fortune in real estate, Demorest launched a new business, the Woman's Tea Company. Its mission was twofold: to make money by importing and distributing the very best tea, and to provide dependent women, primarily widows and single women, with a respectable means of self-support. Susan King, who sailed to Japan and China to purchase the tea, made it clear that their goal was economic - not political - independence for women. "If ever women do get the right of suffrage it will be through their showing the ability to win the dollar, and win it just as men do."6

The Woman's Tea Company turned Demorest and King into merchants, an unusual commercial role for women of the day. (In fact, trading in foreign goods was not deemed proper work for a lady.) Their tea was sold broadly: Customers in Madame Demorest's emporium enjoyed sipping tea while trying on clothes, wealthy families purchased the tea for their households, fashionable clubs and hotels put in thousand-dollar orders, and - as Demorest and King had hoped - hundreds of women agents earned their living selling tea throughout the country.