Books: Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition

The Chicago World Fair of 1893 was a celebration of American ingenuity and modernism. Also referred to as the Columbian Exposition, it commemorated 400 years of America since Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Fairs of this type are always more than the sum of their sideshows. They are huge and expensive; they seek to represent national abstracts – progress, creativity, genius, collectivity and future vision. (Britain had done much the same in 1851 with the Great Exhibition and it would do it again a century later with the Festival of Britain.)

The Columbian Exposition was big – 644 acres in south Chicago with malls, buildings, exhibition halls, lagoons and artworks. It boasted electrically lit buildings and coloured spotlights.

The world’s first big wheel (touché to the Eiffel Tower that had wowed visitors to the 1889 French fair) was a big draw. Americans visited and revisited in their millions.

They were attracted as much by the presentation of the modern world as its antithesis: in the fair’s Midway section, rudimentary rural dwellings, Samoan villages and folkloric exhibits showed what many of their families had left behind.

Author and Stanford art historian Wanda Corn points out the “profound experience” that visitors gained from the fair, an event that was memorialised with souvenirs of every imaginable type. This Chicago fair served many needs, not least the appeal to a symbolic national unity following the trauma of the civil war.

Moreover, the United States was still in the process of making itself: in 1893 it consisted of 44 states (today there are 50) and then, as now, there was much debate about what was, or who could be, an American. This latter was debated with some urgency as new immigrants arrived daily at America’s ports.

These themes may have been undercurrents to the narrative of the fair, but they were present, as was the issue of gender – and the role of women in this new world. Corn’s focus is, as her title suggests, on women’s contributions to the fair, not just as artists but also as managers.

One of the constructions of the exposition was the Women’s Building. Financed by the US government and organised by hundreds of “lady managers” (led by their philanthropist president Bertha Palmer), architects and artists, the function of the neo-classical building was to demonstrate everything that the modern woman was capable of. High-minded debates held there ranged from dress reform to professional emancipation.

This book, written with contributions from art historians Charlene Garfinkle and Annelise Madsen, is incisive and has an acute eye always open for the historical – artistic, political and social – contexts of the exposition.

Sidebars appear on female suffrage (a hot issue in 1893), Parisian public art (a beaux-arts model for much of Chicago’s murals), and the first women’s pavilion at the 1896 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

All this is significant, because the thrust of the Women’s Building and its contents was more subtle than the brash celebrations of the rest of the fair.

While its overt emphasis was on “quality and equality” – and Palmer drew in artists and contributors from all over the world to fulfil this – the psychic significance reached far beyond this.

Corn is right in seeing that the fair presented gendered narratives: the male ones “configured in a world history of civilisation”, the female counterpart concentrating on the “liberation from the confinements of a patriarchal past”.

Corn marshals her argument well. Women Building History has a wealth of supporting data – plans, photographs, biographies of the main women involved with the Women’s Building.

How successful was the Women’s Building? Corn notes that it would be another 75 years before a new wave of feminist artists emerged to challenge the authority of the academy. But in so doing, she acknowledges the work that Palmer and her cohorts actually achieved as a first wave of feminism.

Louise Gray is a freelance journalist