A brief chapter in the history of the bourgeoisie
I took the moral high ground in all things political when I was eighteen or nineteen—on Vietnam, civil rights, women’s rights, capitalism, American imperialism. But I thought nothing of shoplifting.
Always clothes. Always more expensive than I would ever—or could ever—have bought myself. I would calmly go into a dressing room, stuff the coveted items into my backpack, and leave the store with an airy wave.
Mostly I shoplifted in Ann Arbor where I was going to college. I particularly remember a beautiful white peasant blouse with multi-colored smocking above my breasts and long sleeves with elastic at the wrists. The material was silky and somewhat thin (not a cotton peasant blouse, a bourgeois replica). I slipped the blouse into my backpack in the brightly lit dressing room of the small, tony boutique. How did I leave undetected? Did I stop going to stores where I’d stolen merchandise or brazenly return wearing items I’d stolen? I’m guessing I returned without thinking twice. It was part of feeling invincible.
I didn’t wear bras at the time, and my stylish young aunt said with some admiration when I wore the peasant blouse at home, “Where’d you get the boobies?” We were both fairly flat-chested. She’d come of age in the era of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe and minded a lot. I came of age in the era of Twiggy and didn’t mind at all. I wore the blouse frequently. If she’d asked where I got the blouse, would I have told her? Maybe. I told my aunt everything.
The last time I shoplifted, my biggest heist by far, I gathered an entire wardrobe for a summer secretarial job—probably hundreds of dollars-worth of clothes. I walked through Bamberger’s department store in New Jersey, holding skirts and dresses against me in front of walls of mirrors and, if they appealed to me, dropping them into a paper bag with handles. I didn’t make much effort to hide what I was doing and sure enough, a lantern-jawed, short-haired, female security guard gripped me by the arm and hustled me into an interior labyrinth of halls I’d never seen before, and finally into a sort of interrogation room. I started crying immediately and didn’t stop crying the entire time she questioned me.
“Are you going to tell your parents?” she asked. “No. They have enough problems,” I said. She let me off with a warning and told me they never wanted to see me in the store again. I was rattled enough that I never shoplifted again, but not so rattled that I didn’t do a series of photos in a Fotomat machine later that day for my boyfriend back in Ann Arbor, chin up, expression defiant. I wore a sort of red polka dot one-piece outfit with hot pants and a long matching vest, blue polka dotted. It was probably stolen.
I still don’t know how I reconciled shoplifting with my supposedly high ethical standards. Was it a thrill to take risks like that? Did I think I was invisible as well as invincible? Maybe I believed I was stealing from “The Man,” or that stores and manufacturers were ripping us off. Shoplifting, I rationalized, was my protest against capitalist exploitation. Or maybe I just wanted more than I had, growing up with my penny-pinching parents in an affluent suburb, my father a Depression-scarred Irish-American engineer and self-made man. I still have a chip on my shoulder about rich people.
I own another peasant blouse now, embroidered in red, and whenever I wear it I reflect on my shoplifted blouse. I pose in front of the hall mirror, and marvel at my delusion at nineteen that I was one of the peasants and not the bourgeoisie.
Jacqueline Doyle is professor emeritus of English at California State University, East Bay, and author of The Missing Girl. Her creative nonfiction has earned numerous Pushcart nominations and seven Notable Essay citations in Best American Essays. Find her online here.