Woman’s Pavilion

JOANNE: The World’s Columbian Exposition pulsed with the idea of innovation and modernity. On one hand, visitors could marvel at technological advances like the electric gleam of the White City. But fair organizers wanted to put American social progress on display as well. That included the question of what the future would look like for women.

NATHAN: In the lead up to the fair, women’s groups lobbied hard for official space and representation at the exposition. The result was the woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: The building’s purpose was specifically and precisely explicitly to locate women within the modern world. Tracy Jean Boisseau is a historian at Purdue University.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Even in its own moment, it was perceived by visitors, commentators on the fair, as one of the most innovative aspects of this particular exposition.

NATHAN: That’s because Chicago was the first World’s Fair to dedicate an entire exhibit to the achievements of the so-called fairer sex. Women also played key roles in developing the space major decisions were made by the board of Lady Managers. And the structure itself was designed by a woman, 21-year-old Sophia Hayden.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Most women talk about how proud they were to realize women’s accomplishments. The building would have been filled with evidence of women’s contribution to the modern world, their contributions to industrial innovation, to technology. So there are lawyers, and there are authors, and a library, a women’s library that had about 7,000 volumes in it. This was an attempt to collect a copy of all of the books authored by women gathered in one place.

NATHAN: So this sounds like a uniformly positive idea in all the contributions as you’ve outlined. But I have to imagine that there was some debate about the woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Oh yes, it was not uniformly positive, not between different groups of women and not even within any one demographic of women.

NATHAN: Behind the scenes, women’s groups vied for power and representation. Black women, for example, were largely excluded. But the most high profile fight was waged over control of the exhibit, pitting the wealthy socialites of Chicago, like Board of Lady Managers president, Bertha Palmer, against more radical women, like Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Those two groups battled over whether or not the women’s building should be all about demanding more political rights for women, especially in terms of the public sphere, or whether or not it should be merely a celebration of women’s status as it was at that moment in the United States. For the most part, Bertha Palmer wins out with that.

NATHAN: So tell me about Bertha Palmer.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Well, Bertha Palmer was very comfortable in the limelight. She was not the power behind the throne. She very much wanted to be the power in the throne. And I use the term throne advisedly because she often was referred to as the queen of the fair. Or she talks about herself as a queen. She was very hands on in the decision making with everything to do with the women’s building. So Bertha Palmer gets to get her say out in lots of different ways. But there are so many other voices that find a way in.

NATHAN: So you’ve got, it sounds like, a debate or a set of conversations about the state of women at the fair, but also in the late 19th century.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Exactly. So for instance, once Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragists and women’s rights advocates were excluded from the organizing of the women’s building, they formed their own rival association and did everything they could to undermine the Board of Lady Managers.

NATHAN: Wow.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: So they formed what they called the Queen Isabella association. So they tried to sort of raise her up as the female equivalent of Columbus in the discovery. They erect a statue, have the sculpture itself in its own pavilion. And then hold a series of political speeches and exhibits there in an attempt to present a more radical, or at least politicized, messaging. So I think that having that Isabella statue was in your face, Bertha Palmer, in a really productive way.

NATHAN: So you’ve got this debate that’s happening. Is it safe to say that the architecture and the presence, and just the fact of the woman’s building in real, hard stone, that that reflects some kind of resolution in the sense that you’re going to take something away from the fair about women and their contributions simply by virtue of the fact that this magnificent building is there at the fair?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Absolutely. And that’s what we see in women’s comments in magazines and in newspaper coverage. But I think that all of the contests for power tell us more than anything how important this opportunity was. There was no other opportunity, no other venue open to women at this moment in the 19th century to come together and to see each other. So it shouldn’t surprise us to see as much contention as we see because there was a lot at stake. This event becomes a huge, important moment for women’s organizing. And that’s what we see more than anything else, I think.

And I think it’s on display most obviously in the women’s Congress, the Congress of representative women that’s held for a week at the outset of the fair.

NATHAN: What was that?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: So the Congress of Representative Women, often just referred to as the Congress of Women, was the biggest, most important gathering of women who were both professional or high profile in some way, often for their politics. There were about 150,000 women in attendance over the course of just six days to hear over 300 different speeches by prominent women that they would have heard of that would have been in the national press. But the Congress was not micromanaged by Bertha Palmer or the Board of Lady Managers.

And so inevitably these speeches were more than simply applause for women’s achievement, but in actual claims on the public sphere and claims on more political rights and women’s suffrage.

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