Full Description
This field-defining work opens the study of world's fairs to women's and gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity, exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. As the first global gatherings of mass numbers of attendees, world's fairs and expositions introduced cross-class, multi-racial, and mixed-sex audiences to each other, as well as to cultural concepts and breakthroughs in science and technology. Gendering the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor in the world's fairs' incredible power to shape public opinions of nations, government, and culture. Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries' exhibits and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago to Paris, the essays cover topics including women's work at the fairs; the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism; and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers' experience of the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by preeminent world's fair historian Robert W. Rydell. Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois, Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne Wohlcke.
Contents
FOREWORD vii
Robert W. Rydell
WORLD'S FAIRS IN FEMINIST HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1
TJ Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn
PART 1 WOMAN, GENDER, AND NATION
1. "Little Black Rose" at the 1934 Exposicao Colonial Portuguesa 19
Isabel Morais
2. The New Soviet Woman at the 1939 New York World's Fair 37
Alison Rowley
3. Japan -- Modern, Ancient, and Gendered at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair 56
Lisa K. Langlois
4. Manliness and the New American Empire at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition 75
Sarah J. Moore
PART II WOMEN IN ACTION
5. Mormon Women, Suffrage, and Citizenship at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair 97
Andrea G. Radke-Moss
6. Internationalist Peace Activism at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition 113
Anne Clendinning
7. The Woman's World's Fairs (or the Dream of Women Who Work), Chicago 1925-1928 131
TJ Boisseau
8. Memorializing the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Woman's Building 149
Elisabeth Israels Perry
PART III GENDERED SPACES
9. Encountering "Woman" on the Fairgrounds of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition 169
Abigail M. Markwyn
10. Woman's Buildings at European and American World's Fairs, 1893-1939 187
Mary Pepchinski
11. Policing Masculine Festivity at London's Early Modern Fairs 208
Anne Wohlcke
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 227
CONTRIBUTORS 233
INDEX 237
