Monday, June 05, 2006

Questions for The Devil in the White City

1. What does The Devil in the White City reveal about women’s lives in the 1890s? About attitudes toward women?

2. Why does the book begin (and end) aboard The Olympic?

3. Why is it appropriate to tell the tale of Holmes alongside that of Daniel Burnham and the Fair?

4. Larson writes that Holmes “fit the prevailing ideal of the self-made man who through hard work and invention pulled himself rung by rung into the upper strata of society” (64). By this definition, are there other self-made men in the book? Explain.

5. What is the Black City? How is it related to the White City? Historically, do you think they were binaries (direct opposites)? Why or why not?

6. Do you agree with Larson that “the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become” (210)?

7. What are we to make of the architectural themes in the book?

8. Where in the book do we see fraud and façade?

9. What role does the Panic of 1893 (an economic depression) play in the book?

10. Control, systems, efficiency: discuss.

11. What is the relationship of urban despair to civic optimism?

12. Late-nineteenth century ideas of masculinity? Their intersections with class? And race?

13. How did the Fair change the way Americans looked at their cities?

14. Disneyland and the White City: compare, contrast. Is the White City a magic kingdom of sorts? Why or why not? (See page 373.)

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Women at the 1893 World’s Fair

by Leslie M-B

In her dissertation Representing the Expansion of Woman’s Sphere: Women’s Work and Culture at the World’s Fairs of 1876, 1893, and 1904, Mary Cordato writes of women’s responses to such nineteenth century changes as
shifts from a Protestant to a scientific and secular world view; from a preindustrial to a more complex industrial order; from an homogeneous to a fragmented social fabric; and from a political philosophy of liberalism based on individualism and laissez-faire to one defined by social responsibility and a more activist, efficient, bureaucratic government. (7)

Cordato explains that women felt ambivalent about these changes. This was a time of new roles for women as well as for men, but traditional ideas about women’s roles remained strong (7-8). As we have discussed in class, progressive women took their traditional roles as moral arbiters of the domestic realm and applied to them to a new context: the public sphere.

World’s Fairs, then, became one site where women could showcase the progress they were making against social ills as well as celebrate women’s art, craft, intelligence, and creativity. However, although women increasingly mingled with men in the public sphere, their comparatively limited autonomy, some women feared, would make their contributions pale in comparison to men’s contributions to the fairs. Would fairgoers flock to see needlework, photography, and displays about social hygiene as readily as they did to the huge engines on exhibit at the fairs?

Accordingly, women at the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago for the most part worked independently from men, forming their own committees and boards and ensuring space would be set aside for the display of women’s work. Cordato writes that
Through these separatist institutions, promoters achieved a collective consciousness based upon womanly ideals. This consciousness assumed an explictly political dimension, a dimension that held genuine feminist potential. Through the elaboration of womanhood, fair women aimed to strengthen the bonds of sisterhood, to increase women’s confidence and choices, to win social, economic, and legal advancement, to abolish unfair restrictions discriminating against their gender, to encourage sexual harmony, and to gain infleunce, leverage, and freedom for all women in and outside the home. (12)

In 1876 and 1893, then, women felt it was important to have governing bodies and physical space of their own. By the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, however, the women’s building housed only administrative offices, not separate exhibits by women. Instead, women’s work was integrated with men’s in buildings throughout the Exposition (Cordato 15). The fairs, then, reflected changing American beliefs, values, and priorities.

Of course, the story—women’s exhibits separate from men’s in 1876 and 1893, and integrated with them in 1904—isn’t quite so straight-forward. Indeed, in 1893, there were power struggles between two groups who wanted to control the fair’s Board of Lady Managers: the Chicago Women’s Auxiliary (also known as the Chicago Women’s Department) and the Queen Isabella Society.

From our vantage point, both organizations might be seen as feminist in that they promoted larger opportunities for women in the public sphere, but the Auxiliary was more interested in working parallel to the fair’s male organizers, supporting their efforts even as they planned their own Woman’s Building. This group of upper-middle-class women sought to represent what Cordato calls “traditional woman’s culture, which represented stability, morality, and perhaps even social justice.” This woman’s culture would “be presented as a counterpoint to the flux and confusion associated with industrialism and urban development” (206).

Where the Auxiliary women tended to be married to wealthy and successful men, the Isabellas were successful professional women and suffragists. While the Auxiliary wished for a separate women’s pavilion to exhibit women’s work, the Isabellas wanted to see women granted a dedicated space for meetings but asked that women’s exhibits be integrated with men’s throughout the fair (Cordato 208).

Question for students: What’s at stake in these two different proposals for exhibiting women’s work?

In the end, the Board of Lady Managers comprised members of both the Auxiliary and the Isabellas, for Susan B. Anthony and others sought to present a united front. “Only an orderly, well-disciplined, non-controversial campaign,” Cordato explains, “for the involvement of women in official leadership roles at the Exposition, Anthony and her colleagues maintained, would lead to long-range success for the cause of woman” (212). There were 117 Lady Managers and 117 alternates; there were no black women or factory workers (Weimann 42-43). The Board’s chair was Bertha Palmer, who is depicted below.



Inside the Woman’s Building
What, then, was actually inside the Woman’s Building? Plenty. A partial list:

    -paintings, pottery, stained glass, textiles, statuary, photographs, and handicraft made by women from the U.S. and several foreigh countries, including Spain, India, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Mexico, Italy, France, and Japan.
    -a room of inventions by women
    -Indian and African displays curated by the Smithsonian Institution (showcasing, as one commentator put it, “women’s work in savagery”)
    -an assembly hall
    -a model kitchen
    -a library
    -taxidermy
    -ornamental ironwork
    -a record room
    -wax mannequins attired by famous French stylists
    -displays of educational innovations
    -science exhibits by women, including one honoring Maria Mitchell, a then-famous astronomer who had died in 1889
    -architectural drawings
    -books written by women
    -dolls modeling clothes worn by American women from Puritan days to 1893
    -cut and polished stones from mines owned by women
    -an exhibit, sent by women of New York, of African-American arts, crafts, and professional skills
    -an exhibit on British nursing
    -an organization room populated by diverse clubs and associations
    -a board room
    -three sitting rooms intended for the use of the Lady Managers
    -special activities, including cooking demonstrations, lectures, and receptions
    -a roof garden with a restaurant (Weimann 264-66, 433-36; Shaw 61)


Question for students:What are the advantages and liabilities of showcasing women’s contributions to the professions of home economics, social work, and child care? Do exhibits of women’s arts and crafts carry the same advantages and liabilities?

A few women did participate in other parts of the fair, for example by creating displays for the U.S. government’s anthropological exhibits or for exhibits in the Agriculture Building. But their participation in these scientific realms was limited at best, and even the scientific exhibits in the Woman’s Building were small in scale and seemed to reflect less ambition than those created by men. Jeanne Madeline Weimann, author of The Fair Women, explains why:
Women were largely excluded from the centers of scientific activity; they were not taught scientific methods. they were forced in the main to exercise their scientific curiosity by stuffing animals, pressing rose leaves, or drawing natural phenomena. (438)


Women elsewhere at the fair

Of course, women were found throughout the fair as visitors and staff (for example as waitresses and cooks in the restaurant of the Woman’s Building). Many were also on exhibit themselves. We’ll talk about these women in class when we discuss the Midway Plaisance.


Works cited
Cordato, Mary. Representing the Expansion of Woman’s Sphere: Women’s Work and Culture at the World’s Fairs of 1876, 1893, and 1904. Dissertation. History Department, New York University, n.d.

Shaw, Marian. World’s Fair Notes: A Woman Journalist Views Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. n.p.: Pogo Press, 1982.

Weimann, Jeanne Madeline. The Fair Women Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981.

The American Eugenics Movement

by Bonnie P.

A common theme found throughout various aspects of life in the 1890s is the betterment of human life. Many times this effort was successful. Such is the case with the advancement of leisurely activities during the decade or those immigrants lucky enough to encounter Jane Addam's Hull House. However, some efforts to improve the quality of life were, perhaps, a mistake in retrospect. The American Eugenics movement was one of these misdirected efforts.

While still in very early development, the movement had its roots in the 1890s. The intentions of those involved were to better the life of generations to come by inhibiting weaker human qualities from being passed down. As an extension on Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest, scientists aimed to eliminate elements in the gene pool that were not seen as fit.

Dubbed Eugenics by Francis Galton, an English scientist, the movement began in the 1880s, and picked up momentum when combined with the reemergence of the scientific study of genetics after the turn of the century (USHMM). While mostly conceived on European soil, the Eugenics movement also had support in the United States. In fact, some of the advocates of the movement were the progressive former President Woodrow Wilson, women's leader Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice (Black).

Once in America, the movement took hold. Plans were implemented to control the
superiority of the human race "by identifying the so-called 'defective' family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs." The groups targeted most often were those opposite of the "superior" light haired, fair skinned, Nordic race. African Americans, Eastern Europeans, Jews and the disabled were often investigated for their genetic contributions against the white human race (Black). If found under the scrutiny of an American raceologist, one might expect a thorough examination of oneâ•˙s extended family. Exact percentages and measurements of ethnicity and disability among relatives were recorded and weighted for threat to the rest of society. If deemed too much of a threat, sterilization was soon to follow. This eliminated the chance of poor genes to be passed on in the gene pool.

Considered cruel and unusual today, proponents of the American Eugenics movement saw these means as a solution to many of societies problems beyond a faulty gene pool. "Eugenics offered biological solutions to social problems common to societies experiencing urbanization and industrialization" (USHMM). Many thought is would insure "a future free of poverty, addiction and crime" (Sinderbrand). In addition, the need for "costly welfare programs" would lessen with a decreasing presence of hereditary medical problems (USHMM). These hereditary defects were becoming especially problematic as the rates of them increased. The increase was actually attributed to the fact that most educated (and therefore genetically stable) individuals were waiting longer to have children and as a result, had smaller families. In the end, less healthy births changes the ratio of acceptably healthy individuals to disabled individuals (USHMM).

Although research was being conducted in several areas of the world, the United States brought a uniquely American twist to the Eugenics equation: capitalism. Many people may be surprised to find that much of the research executed in America was funded by big business. "The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune" (Black). The Rockefeller Foundation even helped to finance the racial scientists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany (Black). This is an interesting subject because, in essence, all consuming Americans, including those who would ultimately suffer from the repercussions of the research, were paying for the American Eugenics program.

But the repercussions of the movement extend far beyond the 60,000 sterilized Americans (Sinderbrand). By the time of World War I, the philosophies of Eugenics had reached the hands of the Nazi regime. "Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder" (Black).

Today, the United States is still paying for its Eugenics science experiment. Although many states will not admit to the involuntary sterilization of immigrants and the disabled, some states are taking responsibility, including North Carolina and Virginia. Because sterilizations took place into the 1970s, both states offer health care options for Eugenics movement survivors (Sinderbrand).

Images:
Eugenics Archive
Deadly Medicine Exhibition

Works Cited:

Black, Edwin. "War Against the Weak."
accessed 17 May 2006.

Sinderbrand, Rebecca. "Eugenics in America." Newsweek Magazine Online. accessed 15 May 2006.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Deadly Medicine." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Web site. accessed 15 May 2006.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Final exam questions

Two of the three following questions will appear on your take-home final exam, and you will craft an essay in response to one of them. I will announce the two questions in class on Wednesday, June 7.

Your typed final exam will be due no later than 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 10. I will be in our usual classroom to collect them between 9:30 and 10 a.m. that day. Exams may be turned in earlier to my mailbox in 2134A Hart Hall. Please do NOT turn in exams to my office in Kerr Hall..

No late exams will be accepted. No exceptions!


Note: All responses must reference The Devil in the White City. You should, of course, also draw on other course readings and lectures (including by guest lecturer Melissa Strong and the political cartoons and poems passed out in class). You may draw on relevant blog entries as well. The majority of your references should come from material presented in the second half of the course.

1. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson refers to “transitional women” (199). What does he mean by this term? In what ways were women transitioning during the 1890s, and how are these transitions connected with the themes of this course?

2. In what ways did imperialism and science go hand-in-hand in the 1890s? At the 1893 World's Fair, did one justify the other, or were they codependent?

3. What factors of the 1890s made bicycles so popular? Do the same factors, or different ones, account for the popularity and success of The White City, the Midway Plaisance, and Coney Island?