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.