Chapter 33
In the pleasant haze of memory, the United States in the 1920s was a Jazz Age free-for-all for women, slurping gin cocktails, shaking it at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to the Flying Charleston or the Lindy Hop, then taking a breather to read H.L. Mencken’s The Smart Set. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser.”
The larger reality was less liberate. In 1914, Margaret Sanger used the phrase “birth control,” the expression she coined, in a publication called The Woman Rebel. For that thought crime, Sanger was indicted for nine violations of the Comstock Law, the 1873 federal legislation aimed at suppressing obscene material. Not until 1936 was the law modified to decriminalize the dissemination of contraceptive information.
The work world was little better than the contraceptive one. The 1920 census showed that a 9 percent share of married women were “gainfully employed” in occupations such as clerks, stenographers, laundresses, and waitresses. Those who qualified as “professional” were usually schoolteachers. The Equal Pay Act, which made it illegal for employers to pay a woman less at those careers than what a man would receive for the same job, was decades away.
In that world, as confining as a corset, the Women’s World’s Fair of 1925 took place. Held in April of that year at Chicago’s Furniture Mart, the fair was conceived by Helen Bennett, the manager of the Chicago Collegiate Bureau of Occupations, and Ruth Hanna McCormick, daughter of the distinguished fixer Mark Hanna, a suffragist, and later congresswoman.
Bennett, the author of “Women and Work,” wanted to highlight women’s accomplishments from the fine arts to the sciences to industry—and point the way to fulfilling vocations. An Imperator Furiosa of women’s rights, Bennett found succor from the Women’s Republican Club of Chicago for an expo that would give these issues the prominence they deserved.
The fair, however, possessed a dual purpose. The first was to display women’s accomplishments in the arts, sciences, and industry. The second was to raise money to support women’s Republican Party organizations.
Presenting women’s ideas and achievements to a mass audience through expos was an idea already half a century old. At the Women’s Pavilion for 1876 Centennial International Exposition, 30,000 square feet of space held six types of exhibits, from “Painting and statuary by women artists” to “Inventions of women in machinery and other fields of labor.” The pavilion, steered into existence by Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, offered a variety of machines “designed to economize household labor.” Designed by women, the labor-saving devices included a section of gas-heated irons, a portable combination traveling bag/chair, a dishwashing machine “which not only cleans but dries,” and surgical and dental equipment for those partial to home remedies.
The Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition came out of the same formula as the 1876 expo before it and the 1925 Women’s World’s Fair after. A Windy City Khaleesi—in this case, Bertha Honore Palmer, spouse of Potter Palmer of the Palmer House Hotel, the “Mrs. Astor of the Middle West,” and fervent feminist—channeled upper-class financial and social clout to create a stand-alone environment showing off the accomplishments and potential of women in the arts and industry.
With two acres of exhibit space, the $138,000 Woman’s Building was itself designed by a woman—Sophia Hayden, of Boston, who won the $1,000 prize in a national competition with her pitch for an Italian Renaissance structure. The exhibits had the whiff of upper-brow culture and the entrenched view of women as savior angels and delicate aesthetes—a model kindergarten and hospital demonstrated the acceptable roles of professional women as helpers and caregivers, while the on-site library held over 7,000 books and manuscripts, all by women, including volumes by George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. Interestingly, displays put on by some of the Seven Sisters colleges (Bryn Mawr, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley) suggested that women’s particular needs were best fulfilled by sex-segregated institutions.
The Women’s World’s Fair mixed and matched several of the world’s fairs elements in order to take a few more baby steps off the pedestal that diminished rather than elevated.
McCormick and the Women’s Republican Club had sufficient clout to arrange for President Calvin Coolidge to open the fair with a radio address. Nearly 160,000 attendees—more than the 1920 population of Dallas, Houston, or Nashville—explored the show floor’s 280 booths. The exhibitors included major corporations such as Illinois Bell Telephone Co. and national and regional newspapers, as well as area manufacturers, banks, and hospitals. Women’s groups were represented by such organizations as the Women’s Trade Union League, the Visiting Nurse Association, the YWCA, and Hull House. The 4-H Club Girl’s exhibit was a miniature household reflecting 4-H standards for Home Decoration.
Individual female lawyers and inventors set up booths, too, that emphasized women’s contributions in their respective callings. Indeed, the biggest draw of the fair came from this cadre: a young African-American inventor, Lillian Tolbert, who designed the Tolbert ice pitcher. All in all, the fair offered information on 100 occupations in which women were engaged, a gamut that ranged from needlework and pottery to silver fox farming and goat breeding.
Besides raising $50,000 for the Republicans, the fair was considered so effective that it was held for three more years. The list of industries exhibiting expanded into architecture, engineering, dentistry, banking, publishing, and printing. Its lineup of speakers made it the TED talks of its time: Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman governor in the country; Jane Addams, social worker and founder of Hull House; and Katherine Stinson, an early aviator. Visitors could also attend sessions on saving money, maintaining health, or even glimpsing their future with fortune-tellers.