Commissionairess

“What if women commissioners should be appointed?” asked the Doubter. “Create the title, ‘commissionairess’,” said the Serious Minded.

[…]but when the door was opened for him and he had to an address he remembered that he wanted to go nowhere in particular, unless to see the second commissionairess forty yards further on.

The Commissionairess. Have you noticed how the women doorkeepers outside the big stores have already hit off exactly the pose of the old commissionaires? There is something about a doorkeeper unlike any other mortal—a certain Olympian, if polite, contempt of the ordinary shopping person, a congenital distrust of the lap dog. Woman, wonderful creature, has acquired all that in a week. She treads the pavement as though she had just bought it; she glances up at the shop windows, not with a woman’s usual acquisitive glance, but with a “still there, are you?” look. To see her blow her whistle is an education; to see her summon a motor is an event.

The Commissionairess. “My duties? Oh, light enough in a way, though they make you feel rather slow now and then. It doesn’t want much energy to whistle up a taxi, does it? “But the uniform! Just look at it! The skirt! Did you ever see such a cut? Why, it might have been made for my grandmother!” “And the hat! How could any girl with an oval face like mine look nice in a hat without a brim? “No, the work isn’t hard. But the uniform!”

Corps of Commissionairesses.

[…]minister-girls, and commissionairesses, who are filling the places of men[…]

Every now and again some of the West End shops are seized with the craze of exhibiting lady commissionaires in fancy costume. After a time many of them disappear (the commissionairesses, not the shops), possibly because they cannot stand the curious and amused glances of passers-by or the impertinent “asides” of messenger boys. Yesterday I saw that another shop—in Regent-street—had started. A pretty girl dressed up in comic opera Hussar’s uniform was trying to look unconcerned.

SINCE women have taken a prominent part in all sorts of public services, life all round has become much more pleasant. The magistrate who made such complimentary remarks about the “conductorette” the other day was really expressing the general opinion about the “footwoman” and the van-woman, the lift-woman and the page-girl, the commissionairess in her smart braided uniform, and all those other “war workers” in unaccustomed professions who have now become an accepted fact of life.

An exceptionally whimsical fact about this Wooden Curtain is, that those who have once been granted the right to live behind it, can, by all means, at all times, come out of it—except on a few occasions when the gigantic and direful commissionairesses’, probably under instructions from the authorities, are guarding all approaches to the Free World: but the inhabitants of the ‘Free World’ cannot at any time, under any circumstances, enter the territory behind the Wooden Curtain.

A call from Joan Axelrod’s secretary to tell me she and her commissionairess waited lunch for me yesterday.

Susan Karp and Sharon Kass, Co-Commissionairesses