Women Take the Political Stage
Thousands of visitors gathered to watch five hundred progressive women stage the Pageant of Peace in the fair’s Court of Abundance on June 5. The performance’s “seven scenes and fourteen tableaux” included angels of peace, Campfire Girls, and local college students embodying various nations of the world.1 Earlier that afternoon, fifty-six speakers addressed the question of peace in meetings in thirty-three different buildings across the fairgrounds.2 Following the conclusion of the meetings, a procession of participants singing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Hymn of Peace,” marched across the grounds to the Inside Inn.3 Speakers at the ensuing dinner included Madame Chen Chi, wife of the Chinese commissioner-general, and Madame Abiko, wife of the managerial head of the Japanese Newspaper Association of the United States.4 The International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace (ICWWPPP) and the Women’s Congress of Missions (WCM), two conventions being held simultaneously at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, cosponsored these events and designed them as enormous spectacles with serious moral and political meanings. Fueled by a devotion to Christian principles, the female organizers of both groups perceived the exposition as a place where women from around the world could work together to further the causes of peace and women’s well-being.
Visitors to the fair encountered an even larger event two months later. Women suffragists staged a spectacular pageant in the Court of the Universe to celebrate the conclusion of the first-ever national convention of women voters. Ten thousand people packed the venue to watch a carefully scripted pageant that included local Chinese schoolgirls dressed in traditional Chinese costume and young women garbed to represent the women of other enfranchised nations. The event culminated in a grand send-off of the two women chosen to escort a three-mile-long right-to-vote petition on its cross-country automobile trip to Congress. City residents opened up their newspapers the next morning to find accounts of the event, and two days later subscribers to the San Francisco Bulletin read an entire edition dedicated to suffrage and women’s issues.
Women’s groups of all kinds took advantage of the fair to meet, discuss, and publicize their work and ideas. Women’s organizations sponsored 114 of the 928 congresses and conventions that met in conjunction with the PPIE, a significantly larger number than at any previous exposition. College alumnae groups met and reminisced. Teachers discussed how to improve their working conditions. Nurses shared the newest techniques and professional opportunities. Missionaries addressed the challenges they faced both at home and abroad. And, as the earlier examples suggest, groups with more explicit political motives, and a sometimes global view of female internationalism, seized the opportunity to display their vision of the world to fairgoers.5 As with other groups that met at the fair, these women staged parades, pageants, and speeches for all fairgoers, as well as for the attendees of their meetings. Local newspapers disseminated their ideas by reporting on their events. In this way suffragists, peace activists, temperance crusaders, and Christian proselytizers took the opportunity to make the fair into an enormous public political stage.
Given the Progressive Era’s political context, it is not surprising that organized womanhood seized this opportunity. Women’s organizations flourished in the late nineteenth century, and by 1915 women had solidly claimed the authority to speak on issues regarding women, children, and urban life. By the teens, suffragists used public spaces of all kinds to rally for their cause. They held huge parades, created advertisements, designed pageants, and otherwise inserted themselves into public spaces to gain supporters and force unwilling male politicians to pay attention to their demands. Fairs offered women excellent venues for organizing. Few scholars, however, have considered how women’s use of fairs changed between the 1890s, when the impressive Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exposition defined women’s participation in public life and fairs, and 1915, when the PPIE, despite its location in a suffrage state, did not include a Woman’s Building.6 Only recently have scholars begun to seriously consider the activities of women beyond these buildings.7 The plethora of women’s organizations during the 1910s and the active political role of California women meant that women’s activities at the fair were so varied that it is impossible to consider them all. A closer look at the activities of some of the most visible groups of organized women reveals the multiple strategies that women used to make the fair into a political space. In addition, the fair’s close links to Asia and the Pacific created an unparalleled opportunity for organized women to facilitate public conversations about the global role of women.
San Francisco’s women had long been involved in political causes. Women were the driving force behind the city’s social welfare programs from the 1850s through the 1880s. They reshaped the city’s policies and its social landscape.8 In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle- and lower-class women became more actively involved in social and political causes, working for child labor laws and campaigning on both sides of the temperance issue.9 San Francisco Waitresses Local 48 successfully campaigned against a 1906 law that would have banned them from working in businesses that served liquor.10 During the 1907 streetcar strike, working-class suffragists came into conflict with their middle-class sisters, as union women supported the strike and most mainstream suffragists opposed it.11 This division continued throughout the decade, as middle- and upper-class female reformers united with male reformers to urge reform of the city’s apparently corrupt municipal government. During the graft trials, organized middle-class women actively supported the prosecution, while working-class women generally opposed it.12
This local history of female political involvement facilitated the activities of organized women at the fair. The 1911 suffrage victory politicized many women. During the campaign itself supporters used city streets, ferries, hotels, department store windows, and theaters, as well as more traditional political venues, to publicize their message. They worked to make suffragists and the suffrage message common sights around the state and in the press.13 Members of Bay Area women’s clubs, such as Berkeley’s Twentieth-Century Club, hoped to use the fair as a place to meet, campaign, and raise awareness of political issues.14 This population offered a ready audience for social events, conventions, parades, and pageants. The financial backing of Phoebe Hearst, the head of the exposition’s Woman’s Board, and of other prominent Bay Area women and the support of the Woman’s Board itself eased the integration of suffragists on the fairgrounds and allowed them to stage a significant presence at the fair.15
Fig. 52. Woman’s Party Congressional Union booth at the San Francisco exposition, spring 1915. L–R, front: Mrs. May Wright Sewall, Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett (Alexandria, Virginia); rear: Miss Anita Whitney (California), Mrs. Mary Beard, Miss Vivian Pierce, Miss Margaret Whittemore. (Library of Congress.)
Like ethnic and racial groups, groups of women seized upon the visual and performative nature of the fair to construct social and political identities. Members of the newly formed Congressional Union (CU) for Woman Suffrage, under the national radical leadership of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, erected and manned a booth, held meetings and conventions, and staged pageants and parades. Their events had one goal—to convince male and female voters to support a federal amendment for women’s suffrage. Although the male fair organizers demonstrated no evidence of support for women’s suffrage, the success of California’s 1911 suffrage referendum forced male fair directors into tolerating the activities of politically organized women on the fairgrounds.
Suffragists operated out of the official CU booth, which stood alongside similar exhibits of reform and educational groups in the Palace of Education and Social Economy. The CU was not the only exhibit of organized women in the building. Visitors would also have encountered displays and representatives from such groups as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Girls’ Friendly Society of America, and the National Council of Jewish Women.16 The booth composed part of the fair’s extensive exhibit on “social economy” and served as a paean to the accomplishments of the white woman suffragists of the nineteenth century. Banners greeted all who entered the comfortably furnished booth: “The world has progressed in most ways, but not yet in its recognition of women,” and “We demand an amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchising women.”17 A petition demanding the passage of the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution that would allow women the right to vote formed the centerpiece of the exhibit. Suffrage workers urged all passers-by to sign the ever-lengthening petition. The booth included portraits of Anthony and other prominent suffragists, as well as a reading area with extensive literature on voting for those interested in the history of the movement.
Suffragists used other venues around the grounds to stage speeches, meetings, and conventions that combined spectacular displays with political messages. They used the YWCA auditorium, the Inside Inn, and the very boulevards of the fair to hold these events. According to organizer Sara Bard Field, “The booth had of course to be publicized and to that effect we had many prominent people . . . (who cared about woman suffrage) speak for us at the booth. . . . It became one of the well-known and publicized portions of the . . . Exposition.”18 In April, Crystal Eastman Benedict, Mary Beard, Kate Waller Barrett, and May Wright Sewall spoke at the YWCA, with a reception following at the suffrage booth.19 Less than two weeks later, Alice Park, a prominent California suffragist, rallied for the cause at the booth.20 These events continued throughout the fair, ensuring that suffrage remained in the news both on and off the fairgrounds.
Bay Area women provided an audience for events both on and off the grounds. In the spring of 1915, wealthy San Francisco women, some of whom were also involved with the PPIE’s Woman’s Board, brought the topic of suffrage to their local clubs. In March San Francisco Chronicle society columnist Anne Wilde noted that “suffrage is becoming suddenly popular and respectable.” She observed that the outbreak of war in Europe had convinced many women of the need to vote, but the presence of the CU booth at the exposition and its dedication two days before certainly helped as well. She claimed that within the previous week, many in San Francisco who had previously believed suffrage to be “not entirely ladylike” had changed their opinion. Three months later, during the June suffrage conference, she again reported that “an orgy of suffrage and peace has marked the record of activities in local club circles during the past week.”21 The interest in suffrage also extended across the bay. The Oakland Sunshine reported that the Civic Center, a black women’s club, hosted a speech by prominent white California suffragist Charlotte Anita Whitney on the topic of securing a national suffrage amendment.22 Whether or not suffragists were “ladylike,” they definitely made suffrage a topic of discussion both on and off the fairgrounds.
Fig. 53. Sara Bard Field, suffrage activist. (Library of Congress.)
Suffragists gained extensive publicity in September when Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and husband of a local suffragist, turned the editorship of the paper over to Alva Belmont, Sara Bard Field, and Alice Paul for a day. The women produced an entire edition of the Bulletin dedicated to the political life and progress of women in conjunction with the Woman’s Voter Convention. With articles about the exposition, as well as covering national politics and the suffrage movement, the paper reinforced the connection between suffrage, the fair, and women’s political possibilities. Devoting an issue entirely to women’s matters introduced some male and female readers to a new perspective on the topic, even though the Bulletin was already the city’s most reform-minded paper.23
Suffragists used these articles, speeches, and performances to depict a world peopled by politically active women who confidently acted in the public sphere. An editorial in the suffrage edition of the San Francisco Bulletin expressed their vision with great clarity: “Voting doesn’t take women out of the home, because to a certain extent they are already out of the home. Because they are in the world, working in shirtwaist factories, and preaching, and doctoring, and lawyering, and raising children, and being exploited, they have the right to have a say in the political management of the world. Otherwise democracy is a joke. You can’t be for democracy without being for equal—or, it would be better to say, honest—suffrage.”24 Other articles reflected the CU’s campaign for equal rights, as well as the vote.25 Articles titled “Woman’s Place in Industry,” “Women and the Art of Today,” and “Woman—Her Part Today and Tomorrow” presented their vision to readers of the Bulletin.26 They insisted upon women’s place in public life, arguing that women should be preachers, doctors, lawyers, and shirtwaist workers, and that this participation meant women should have equal rights with men. This perspective radically challenged the limited vision of women’s roles sanctioned by, and offered by, the fair’s Board of Directors. The articles offered a vision of a world in which all women—from shirtwaist workers to lawyers to housewives—had the potential to participate in the political process.
This view of the world relied on racial and class assumptions that meshed with the fair’s dominant racial narrative. Just as the fair celebrated the ascendance of the white male “pioneer” in California, the white women who dominated the suffrage movement also focused their efforts on enfranchising white women. They often deliberately ignored the situation of nonwhite women and working-class women in the United States. They were not afraid to use arguments that played on fears of immigrant threats to white dominance.27 During one set of PPIE suffrage meetings, well-known reformer Florence Kelley made her case for a national amendment in part by blaming the “the steerage vote” (meaning working-class male immigrants) for having obstructed the cause thus far. She argued, “There is nothing the matter with our men in the State of New York. Our trouble is with the steerage. . . . They inundate our shores year after year. . . . Each year there is the same battle with ignorance and foreign ideas of freedom and the ‘place of women.’”28 Other speeches and articles in the CU’s official publication, The Suffragist, echoed these sentiments and demonstrated the frequency with which white middle- and upper-class suffragists used race- and class-based rhetoric in their campaigns.29 The history of class-based antagonism between the working-class suffragists of San Francisco and their middle- and upper-class peers reminds us of these divisions in the suffrage movement.
The CU’s display at the fair articulated these assumptions as well. One exhibit case in the booth held a collection of cartoons reflecting the history of suffrage and included one cartoon that depicted “President Wilson as a two-headed orator raised upon a monument of his own historic literature which is crowned by his work on the New Freedom. One of Mr. Wilson’s heads, wreathed in smiles, is turned toward a little Filipino man; the other head, directed toward a disfranchised American woman, wears an extremely nipped and frosty expression.”30 This image played on popular perceptions of Filipinos as “little brown men” who were not equal to whites.31 The Filipino man depicted was heavily racialized—showing him as child size, bowing toward President Wilson, and wearing a vacant smile on his face—while the respectable white woman was drawn as an adult, with the word “womanhood” on her dress.32 The U.S. government had recently enfranchised Filipino men in their native territory. How, wondered suffragists, could Wilson justify extending the vote to Filipino men but not to white women? Similarly, the Suffragist published a number of articles during 1915 that reflected related concerns about maintaining the racial hierarchy at home, citing statistics that implied that the enfranchisement of female voters would assist in maintaining white supremacy.33
These racialized images and rhetoric did not represent all of the work that suffragists at the PPIE undertook. Just as their wider campaign contained contradictory messages about gender and race, so too did their fair campaign. Suffragists used the fair to draw attention to the fact that women in some western states and territories, as well as in some foreign nations, could vote. They juxtaposed the enfranchised women of foreign nations against the disenfranchised white women of the United States. In June, the California branch of the CU sponsored a session on the status of women’s suffrage around the world. Organizers designed this “International Suffrage” meeting to draw attention to the inadequacies of the United States. The meeting included speeches from representatives from all of the nations and states in which women had been granted the vote. Madame Chen Chi, wife of the commissioner-general to the exposition from China, described her experience with suffrage, as did Rouva Mayi Maya from Finland; Coodalook Eide, an Alaskan Inuit; and Neah Tagook, an Alaskan Indian. Dorothy Morrell, a Zone worker who performed as a cowgirl with the 101 Ranch, spoke for her home state of Wyoming. These five women were featured in an article and displayed in a photo in the San Francisco Chronicle in which they wore their “native” costumes—including a full fur hood for Eide, a blanket for Tagook, and Morrell’s cowgirl outfit, hat and all—on a June day in California.34
That these women appeared in their native costumes suggests that organizers hoped to play on the tropes of an exposition and the displays of “exotically” dressed women to make a political statement. It is difficult to deduce exactly the content of that statement. White women’s claim to social power in the late nineteenth century rested in part on their role as participants in what Louise Newman has called “civilization-work,” which included all activities designed at uplifting a race. Bringing Christianity and the ideals of white, middle-class society to native peoples and African Americans at home and to primitive nations abroad was all a part of that work.35 Of the meeting’s participants, Coodalook Eide and Neah Tagook qualified as representatives of peoples most white reformers would identify as “primitive.” As a Chinese woman, Madame Chen Chi was a member of a group that in the United States was not perceived as primitive but was stereotyped as either prostitutes or silent victims of foot binding. Given the prevalence of anti-Chinese racism in the United States, her appearance at the meeting as a political actor contradicted the dominant U.S. racial hierarchy. Presenting these three women as female voters created a curious paradox. Their clothing drew attention to their racial otherness and their difference from white American society, but the Congressional Union had invited these women to speak as voters and to discuss their experiences with voting and participating in the political process.36 The resulting publicity portrayed them as voters, therefore subverting the fair’s racial hierarchy.
Chen played a significant role at the fair. She spoke at the CU meeting, at the September convention of women voters, and at the meetings held by the ICWWPPP. She also represented China at events across the fairgrounds. Local papers frequently noted her presence and participation, revealing to local readers that this Chinese woman, at least, possessed a political voice and set of opinions. Such a fact was ironic, given that were she a resident of the United States, as a female Asian immigrant she would be doubly disenfranchised in most parts of the country. Her participation, and that of other Asian women at the fair, reveals that the PPIE’s strong ties to Asia offered an unusual visibility for both Asian and Asian American women in the United States during the Progressive Era. Little scholarship exists on the public role of Asian American women in the early twentieth-century United States, so this glimpse into an event that allowed Asian and Asian American women a public stage suggests the need to explore further the attention paid to women like Chen. Local politics—in this case San Francisco’s desire to serve as an entrée to the Pacific—again created opportunities for disenfranchised groups to assert themselves at the fair.
Suffragists used visual strategies to draw attention to their cause as well.37 The San Francisco Chronicle in August featured a photograph of a woman dressed in “fantastic garb”; however, she was not a woman in native dress but a suffragist, adorned in purple and yellow dominoes and a sandwich board advertising a mass meeting of the Congressional Union at the YWCA auditorium. Jessie D. Hampton of New York, Mrs. M. B. Stone of Boston, and Miss Ruth Miller of Berkeley all wore the costumes and paraded the grounds, waving flags and exhorting onlookers to listen to their message. According to the report, this effort was but one of a series of such attempts to publicize the upcoming CU convention in September.38 It was a clever turning of the tables on both the press and the exposition. When suffragists took advantage of the attention that the fair paid to women to forward their own political message, they turned the objectification and commodification of women to their own advantage.
Fig. 54. Mrs. Chen Chi. (Buchanan, History of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.)
Suffragists appropriated the grounds most spectacularly on the evening of September 16, when ten thousand men and women packed into the Court of the Universe to view a suffrage pageant marking the conclusion of the CU-sponsored Woman Voter’s Convention. The display again juxtaposed enfranchised against disenfranchised women. Hundreds of women in colorful costumes from nations in which women were enfranchised filled the stage. The young Chinese female students of San Francisco’s Oriental School in “quaintly colorful native costumes” occupied one end of the stage, again offering a visual counter to the fair’s racial hierarchy. The CU members, dressed in the organization’s colors of purple, white, and gold, occupied center stage. Behind them hung both the American flag and the suffrage banner, which read “We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, enfranchising women.” The ceremony opened with a rousing rendition of a new suffrage anthem set to the “Marseillaise.” Then, Sara Bard Field and Frances Joliffe, the two women chosen to escort the suffrage petition to Washington, and actress Margaret Anglin each addressed the crowd. The spectacle culminated in a grand send-off for Field and Joliffe, as the other women on the stage escorted them to the gates of the exposition grounds while accompanied by audience members. There, Field and Joliffe met the car that would take them across the country to Washington, where they would deliver their message to Congress. With great ceremony, the gates opened, the crowd cheered, and the car drove solemnly away, marking the end of what the San Francisco Bulletin described as “the most dramatic and significant suffrage convention that has probably ever been held in the history of the world.”39 The carefully staged pageant made all of the local papers and again focused attention on the campaign for women’s suffrage.
The elaborate September pageant marked the beginning of Field and Joliffe’s cross-country trek and the conclusion of the politically revolutionary first-ever national convention of women voters. Organizers designed the pageant and convention to showcase women’s political power. Opening speaker and New York philanthropist Alva Belmont urged attendees to “forego alliances with any existing man’s political party, and to work for a new, woman-made civilization.”40 Organizers hoped to show women voters in the western United States their political possibilities and to inspire women in the East, who were tired of fighting what often appeared to be a losing battle, that success was indeed possible. The fair offered space for a potent combination of politics and performance that sparked the political imagination of suffragists nationwide.41
Fig. 55. Suffrage envoy Sara Bard Field (left), driver Maria Kindberg (center), and machinist Ingeborg Kinstedt (right) during their cross-country journey to present suffrage petitions to Congress, September–December 1915. (Library of Congress.)
Suffragists displayed their vision of womanhood to fair visitors in multiple ways. They offered women the opportunity to take a concrete, if small, step toward national suffrage by signing their petition for a national amendment. By the time they sent it to Washington in September, it had grown to three miles in length and included the signatures of more than 500,000 women. The appearance of well-known suffragists at the fair also ensured that visitors had ample occasions to hear women experienced in the fight make their case for the cause. Field argued that it fostered incredible unity among women. “I can hardly speak of it without possible exaggeration,” she remembered. “They heard the women from all the other states who didn’t know about the Congressional Union, who cared or didn’t care perhaps until they heard some of the wonderful and beautiful speeches made about the Eastern women. I think they got a new vision of something they could do with their vote outside of their own immediate state. . . . They signed readily, there was no urging or begging. They just came up and wanted to sign.”42 The mere presence of the suffrage booth in the Palace of Education and Social Economy validated the organization’s existence and provided a headquarters for these activities. Even if only a few visitors stopped each day, that number was more than organizers could hope for by setting up shop in any other venue.
Women’s activism at the PPIE encompassed more than political campaigns. Suffragists frequently cooperated with the YWCA, another group of active, organized women that appropriated space at the fair to exhibit themselves, their work, and their worldview to fairgoers. As we have seen the YWCA was involved in the debates about the Zone, cooperating with the Woman’s Board to clamp down on the “girl shows” and gambling contained therein. Their other activities at the fair demonstrated another set of strategies used to stimulate public awareness and discussion of women’s role in society. As a religious organization, the YWCA had a multifaceted mission at the fair. Organizers sought both to proselytize and to meet the practical needs of visitors and employees. Through their example of Christian service, they hoped to improve the lot of others while inspiring them to a life of faith.43 Although these goals differed from those of the women suffragists, they shared common concerns about the need for white women to actively participate in the political world and an ambiguous attitude at times toward the needs and position of nonwhite women. Both goals occasionally challenged the male fair officials’ worldview.
The YWCA Building combined utility with display and performance in an extraordinarily effective way. According to one description, “Here during every open hour of the Exposition the Young Women’s Christian Association will render to the women visitors the special aid and service that the Exposition demands, and here, in one form and another, many of the characteristic activities of the association will be displayed.” The building offered an attractive combination of services: good cheap food, friendly advice about the city to women (and men), and plentiful sitting areas along with movies depicting the YWCA’s work across the nation and a series of speakers on “home economics, hygiene, physical training, recreation, questions of thrift and efficiency, and kindred subjects.”44 Although the YWCA focused on serving female visitors, particularly those attending the many conventions that women’s groups held during the fair, its members welcomed and served any visitors who entered. The YWCA developed a working relationship with women’s clubs in the city and with those organizations holding conventions during the fair in an effort to coordinate activities and to advertise its facilities for women visitors. The decision to combine service with exhibits showed a canny understanding of how best to appropriate the space of the fair to the organization’s advantage.
Fig. 56. YWCA Building. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.)
YWCA leaders hoped that displaying their work for all to see would inspire others to follow suit and strive to ensure the safety of young working women. Films featuring the work of YWCA branches nationwide ran daily in the second-floor assembly room, which was also the site of “lectures, and debates on different subjects of interest to women.”45 Glass cases exhibiting the results of a series of national contests that reflected the YWCA’s values and goals lined the building’s halls. One such series of competitions determined the most skilled in a variety of fields: dressmaking, wardrobe design, writing, and art.46 Another display featured the winning model wardrobes designed for the “college girl” and the “business girl.”47 These contests and the resulting displays created national publicity for the fair and the Y. At the fair, they showcased the values and benefits of the organization for visitors. This combination of action and exhibits did not escape those interested in the YWCA’s work. Local newspaper columnist Helen Dare remarked, “They [the YWCA] are not only going to show what they do for their members, but they are going to show, especially, why they do what they do—and in an extraordinarily convincing way.”48
Visitors to the YWCA Building entered a world organized, administered, and run by and for women. It offered a version of a “Woman’s Building” at the PPIE, despite the exposition’s lacking such an official venue. The white female organizers of the YWCA envisioned a world in which some women worked outside the home and, in some cases, attended college. Like the suffragists, they believed that women belonged in public, and they often cooperated with the Congressional Union by hosting speakers and meetings in the YWCA Building. Yet their assumptions about womanhood also relied on beliefs about race, class, and female sexuality that privileged the ideals of white, middle-class womanhood.49 As with many social reformers of the Progressive Era, they believed that the city teemed with dangers for the unaccompanied young woman, and they made it their mission to “protect” young women from sexual exploitation.50 As the debates concerning the Zone and the behavior of its female cashiers revealed, this so-called protection rejected new, freer, working-class understandings of sexuality and the many modern amusements that young men and women came to the city to enjoy.51
The work of the YWCA demonstrates the need to reconsider the line between formal exhibits and informal encounters on the fairgrounds. Just as the presence of local Asian and black residents at the fair offered alternative visions of their communities to fair visitors, so too did the rhetorical work of the Y extend beyond the exhibits and events staged within the walls of the Y Building. YWCA officials believed that the real value of their presence came from their interactions with visitors and workers at the fair. The organization’s national monthly journal described their work as “not a moving picture film, nor a stand of statistical charts, but a throng of living people—this is the exhibit of the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915.”52 The Y’s welfare work constituted a key part of the organization’s presence, and exhibits, at the fair. By providing friendly and helpful services—meals, a place to rest, referrals to safe lodgings, a children’s day nursery, and Sunday church services—YWCA workers hoped to serve the needs of visitors and in so doing convince them of the value of the world the workers created in the YWCA Building.
Many visitors certainly remained unaware of much of the work YWCA representatives did to promote “the economic, physical, social, intellectual and spiritual interests” of the women who worked on the grounds. Y employees provided classes, dinners, parties, and individual counseling to the thousands of women employed at the fair. They wanted to protect them from the dangers of the city, and the fair, and to help them “lead . . . straightforward, normal, Christian, li[ves].” Through their Zone club house they provided women workers, from the cashiers to the dancing girls and other women of the native villages, with cheap hot meals, hot water, a sewing machine, footbaths, books, and comfortable chairs. There, YWCA workers hoped, women might gain courage “for another day of this life which she believes she is forced to lead; or the greater courage necessary to make a fresh start in a more normal and less perilous career.”53
Through this “personal work” YWCA workers hoped to convey the value of their vision of womanhood to young women and to provide them with necessary services.54 They envisioned a world in which women’s sexuality was not for sale and in which young women could safely appear in public without fear of sexual exploitation. Their view was based on a set of class-based assumptions. As the previous quote indicates, many Y workers believed that the female performers of the Zone, and other women who seemed to have “fallen,” were misguided and lost. They assumed that these young women did not know what was best for their lives and needed the example of white, middle-class Christian women to set them on the right path. Despite these patronizing assumptions, YWCA workers did offer physical benefits to young women at the fair.
The YWCA generally subscribed to the same racial assumptions that undergirded the fair itself. An exposition press release about the YWCA, for instance, reported that its building “is a striking monument . . . of the progress in the race in general in those ethics of civilized societies which impel us to care, not alone of self or friends, but also of the ‘Stranger within our Gates.’”55 As this quote suggests, the women of the YWCA were active proponents of “civilization-work.” In their case, it meant welfare work among working-class white women. These efforts, as Newman notes, “helped consolidate an imperialist rhetoric that delegitimized dissent from nonwhite and non-Christian women.”56 The YWCA Building showcased the progress of the white race in implicit contrast to that of the nonwhite people displayed in other parts of the fair. It was the very “civilized nature” of white society that compelled and emboldened white women YWCA workers to reach out to nonwhite, non-Christian women. The work these white women did actively reaffirmed their position in the racial and social hierarchy.
Yet at moments the Y’s efforts proved more ideologically complex and contradictory. The workers provided for the needs of many nonwhite women whom society, and the fair, willfully disregarded. One YWCA worker’s account about her forays on the Zone illuminates the complicated relationships of race, class, and gender at work. She reported that “one thing that seems quite evident is that we do not regard the show girl and the foreigner as womankind, but rather as belonging to some strange species entirely outside of any need for friendly interest.”57 If we assume her turn of phrase to be a critique of society—“we” being society rather than the YWCA—we see that she challenged society’s, and the fair’s, disregard for the welfare of these young women. Her description of Hawaiians, “colored young women,” cowgirls, and Japanese women who attended the YWCA’s getting-to-know-you dinner at the fairgrounds supports that assumption.58 Its club house on the Zone certainly served the “dancing girls,” with one report noting that they particularly appreciated the footbaths.59 The women of the YWCA provided for the physical needs of all women on the grounds without regard for their racial or ethnic background. Bringing them together and serving their needs during a time when many such facilities were segregated potentially undermined assumptions about racial hierarchy for the young women involved, if not also for interested visitors who might encounter the YWCA’s work on the Zone.60
These displays of the YWCA’s welfare work—and the efforts themselves—served a variety of purposes at the fair. They publicized the work of the YWCA and public awareness of the dangers facing young women in the city. In so doing, these activities bolstered the organization’s basic philosophy that young working women should be able to live and support themselves in the city without risking the fall to prostitution. This vision challenged the fair directors’ use of sexualized images of women to advertise the fair. Although these displays affirmed the dominance of white, middle-class Christian social values and the role of white, middle-class women as bearers of civilization, the activities undertaken by YWCA workers proved more ambiguous. By serving the needs of white and nonwhite women equally and by serving them together rather than in segregated facilities, YWCA workers also emphasized the commonalties between these young working-class women, opening a space for them to form relationships and friendships that could undermine the fair’s strict emphasis on the differences between whites and nonwhites.
Other groups of women (and some men) met at the fair to discuss women’s global, rather than domestic, role. The International Conference for Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace and the Women’s Congress of Missions each drew attendees from around the world, and they came together on the evening of June 5, as the chapter’s opening anecdote indicated, to create a vision of permanent peace. Hundreds of local residents attended the conventions, demonstrating sizable support for the projects in the Bay Area. The WCM took advantage of the city’s cosmopolitan nature to reach out to immigrant communities and to include women of many nationalities in the group’s discussions. Meanwhile, the ICWWPPP’s events offered women a platform from which to create a vision of international cooperation that subverted both the war raging in Europe and colonial relationships worldwide.
The WCM meetings, although infused with a deep sense of Christian evangelism, forwarded a vision of international peace and cooperation that existed uneasily alongside the fair’s glorification of conquest and imperialism. The more than two thousand women who attended the WCM advanced a vision of international cooperation that depended on both Christian principles and a deep devotion to worldwide evangelism. Their meetings brought together female missionaries who worked both at home and abroad and who told the audiences about their efforts to bring Christianity to Native Americans in the United States and to spread the gospel to Asia. The congress was officially a joint meeting of the Federation of Foreign Boards and the Council of Women for Home Missions. Women from twenty-two Protestant denominations attended, demonstrating the breadth of interest in these topics.61 The eight-day-long congress, held primarily at San Francisco’s First Congregational Church, included workshops, lectures, and discussions of literature on a variety of issues. Many sessions focused specifically on women. African American leader Mary Church Terrell, for instance, spoke to the assembly on “The Progress and the Problem of the Colored Women,” in one of the few examples of an African American woman addressing an integrated audience at the PPIE.62
The WCM meetings privileged a vision of womanhood grounded in Christianity that insisted on women’s potential to be international actors. Their message was that female missionaries could and should actively work to bring the Christian faith to foreign peoples. Moreover, at least one speaker called for the breaking down of barriers between nations, as well as the acknowledgement of “the suspicion, hatred, and prejudice, which we have for many years regarded the non-Christian peoples,” calling instead for missionaries to “protect the alien races.”63 Although such rhetoric continued to assume the superiority of Christianity, it called for a respect and cooperation between nations that echoed the messages of the more secular women’s peace movement.
The WCM, like the suffragists, blurred the line between the city and the fair by taking their activities outside the grounds. Their week of events included meetings with the Chinese women at the Presbyterian mission home, a reception with Japanese residents of the city, a rally at a Russian church, and a service for local Persians. According to Frank Morton Todd, these events “added to the interest of the congress, but they did much more than that, for they enlisted the interest of women outside mission work, who were brought, through such events, into touch with those leading in the movement.”64 Organizers were certainly aware of this likelihood when they planned their events. According to one report, the congress was designed in part to “deepen the conviction of individual responsibility in the hearts of the women of the churches.”65 Participants in this and other congresses thus gained a captive audience at the fair, and in the city, by choosing to host their meetings at the PPIE.
Both the WCM and the ICWWPPP sought to involve women in the movement for international cooperation and permanent peace. May Wright Sewall, veteran exposition participant and proponent for peace, designed and organized the ICWWPPP. Her credentials included chairing the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and actively participating in the International Council of Women. After the PPIE, in December 1915, she was slated to accompany Henry Ford on his European peace expedition to Europe. Planning for the PPIE began in the spring of 1914, when President Moore appointed Sewall as chairman of an organizing committee for an “International Conference of the Woman Worker.” Sewall originally wanted to focus on “cooperative internationalism” and to include participants drawn from leading officials of all international societies of women who would come together to share ideas about advancing “the various social, moral and civic reforms that are involved in present international efforts.”66 This discussion, like that of the suffragists and the YWCA, fit easily within the fair’s theme of “service” that linked together its hundreds of congresses and conventions.
The war forced Sewall to change her strategy. She recognized that women of the belligerent nations would likely be unable to travel internationally; moreover, they might be unable to escape wartime nationalist feelings enough to discuss a future of internationalism. The topic of the meeting therefore became “permanent peace,” a more well-defined goal than the “cooperative internationalism” originally proposed. Recognizing the difficulties in asking international bodies headquartered in European capitals to send delegates in a time of war, Sewall called on women to attend the conference as individual supporters of peace.67
Speakers at the conference addressed a variety of perspectives and experiences. They ranged from Madame Chen Chi to William Jennings Bryan. All drew on the assumption that women possessed maternal qualities that made them more inclined toward peace. As Chen noted in her speech, “It has been conceded the world over that women are instinctively more gentle than men.”68 Many speakers echoed these assumptions, reflecting contemporary beliefs that women were inherently maternal, peaceful, and self-sacrificing. Female activists used these ideas to justify their political involvement in causes from municipal reform to peace activism. Yet, although this message was the subtext of the conference, and indeed of the women’s peace movement in general, many women delivered speeches in which they claimed a key role for women in global affairs. The fair’s location in San Francisco and its emphasis on Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific meant that the ICWWPPP included diverse perspectives that had rarely been voiced in pre–World War I international gatherings of women.
Fig. 57. Attendees at the International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace. (#19xx.485 G:13, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley.)
Although “permanent peace” remained the underlying philosophy of the conference, the participants’ speeches revealed persisting nationalist tensions. When California suffragist Alice Park rose to speak for the women of Ireland, she began by reminding the audience, “Ireland, although many people seem not to recognize the fact, is a separate country.” As with the men who spoke at the fair’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration, she used the fair as a space from which to assert Ireland’s independence from its colonial master. She further outlined the ways in which the Irish Women’s Franchise League had “stood against the influence of the mass psychology of the other people in Great Britain and Ireland and in some other countries” by its refusal to engage in relief work and its persistent opposition to war recruitment.69 Such comments reflected the ongoing struggle for independence in Ireland and the persistent antiwar (and at times pro-German) sentiment among the Irish both at home and in the United States.
Señora Isabel S. Shepard, an American woman born in Colombia who spoke for Latin American women at the conference, offered the most pointed critique of U.S. foreign policy.70 She began, like most speakers, by calling on Christian principles to guide the work of the peace effort, even indicting Islam with the comment that “we may not, as Mahomet preached, spread religion by means of the sword.” She praised the United States for its recent positive relations with both Spain and China. Then, she turned to the intense anti-American sentiment of many Colombians. “No one can realize,” she warned the audience, “how intense is the feeling of hatred towards the United States in Colombia,” after the 1903 U.S.-supported revolution that resulted in carving the new nation of Panama out of Colombian territory. “She feels herself despoiled and cheated and robbed,” she said, providing both an intriguing counter to the fair’s celebration of the Panama Canal and a critique of U.S. actions in Latin America. Shepard went on to indict U.S. colonial attitudes toward Latin America. “Do not make fruitless efforts to force your own language, your own ways, and your own customs upon an unwilling people,” she warned. Instead, she asked the audience to learn Spanish, to learn about the cultures of Latin America, and to remember that “each Republic is a separate entity,” as different from each other as were Mexico and the United States. To become better acquainted with the women of Latin America, she suggested that women of the United States travel to South America, where they could visit natural wonders on par with those found in Europe and Asia and where their money would “pour so much needed gold into the empty pockets” that residents would bless the “Yankees.”71
Shepard’s speech upended the fair’s celebration of the Panama Canal and explicitly called for a Pan-Americanism facilitated by women. Although some American female internationalists critiqued U.S. economic and military tactics in Latin America, Shepard’s pointed attack on American attitudes stood out among the other attitudes that were expressed during the rest of the conference and the fair. Historian Leila Rupp has noted that for the most part, early twentieth-century internationalist female organizations were platforms for the women of Europe and the United States. There was very little room for the voices of women from other parts of the world.72 The PPIE’s emphasis on Latin America and the Pacific, combined with the war in Europe, meant that Sewall and other organizers worked hard to bring women from those areas to the conference. They created a space for a public dialogue that countered the fair’s larger celebration of U.S. economic and cultural imperialism.
Although Shepard’s critique of American attitudes toward Latin America gestured at an acknowledgment of U.S. racial stereotypes of Latin America, her own perspective also reflected early twentieth-century Latin American perceptions of race and class. She made no mention of indigenous or poor women. Instead she called for Pan-American unity of middle- and upper-class women who were more alike than not. Her description of South American women reflects this claim: “Her dress is Parisian and her social etiquette. Most frequently her education is obtained in a French convent.”73 Although such characteristics were true of a handful of women from Colombia and other South American nations, the vast majority of South American women at the time lived lives far removed from Paris or its convents. Shepard’s statements echoed the desires of elite early twentieth-century South American men and women who looked to Europe for models of culture and civilization in an attempt to demonstrate their nations’ progress and culture. Such biases were hardly uncommon among the women involved in international organizing. They were generally well-educated, wealthy women whose worldviews were shaped by their own experiences.
Shepard’s call for a female Pan-American movement reminds us that women’s activism at the fair dovetailed with the goals of other international organizations. Supporters of Pan-Americanism, many of whom also supported the PPIE, sought to bring the women of the Americas closer together in an acknowledgment of women’s growing political influence across the region. A group of women from Latin America and the United States held a Woman’s Auxiliary Conference in conjunction with the late December 1915 Pan-American Scientific Congress held in Washington DC. Organized in part by Ellen Foster Lansing, wife of Vice President Robert Lansing, the meetings included the numerous women who came to the congress as wives and family members of the delegates. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs sent a message of friendship to the women of Latin America, and the group heard a number of talks about women in Latin America. The most significant achievement of the meeting was the unanimous passage of a resolution calling for the foundation of a Pan-American women’s organization.74 In 1922, the U.S. League of Women Voters sponsored the creation of such an organization at a Pan-American Conference of Women in Baltimore. The Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women took on the cause of suffrage, among other issues, and marked the beginning of a Pan-American women’s movement.75 Whether links existed between the ICWWPPP and these later meetings of Pan-American women is unclear, but these developments indicate an emerging awareness of a female Pan-American internationalism.
The fair’s focus on Asia and the strength of the local Chinese and Japanese communities meant that Chinese and Japanese women also actively participated in the ICWWPPP meetings. Eleven women, the largest delegation from any foreign nation, represented Japan. Two Japanese women, Madame Abiko and Madame Inui, addressed the conference and emphasized the growing movement for peace in Japan while avoiding any discussion of Japan’s belligerent actions toward China. They drew on the idea of “the sisterhood of all women of the world,” offering the vision of a world in which all women could work together for peace without regard for national borders or racial animosity.76
Inui offered a rather unexpected critique of American racial prejudice in her speech. She told the story of
a little Japanese girl reared by a loving American mother who did not realize she was different from her little playmates. One day, rather unkindly some one said to her, “You are a little Japanese,” and the little girl ran to her mother and said, “Mother, I am not a Japanese, I am an American, am I not?” But today she is glad to be a Japanese, to be with Japanese people, whom in her childhood she did not wish to accept as her own. She with her countrywomen is glad to join in this happy union of the nations in striving to realize a common ideal of peace.77
Although she chose not to expound further on the moral lessons of this anecdote, Inui’s choice to present this story suggests her desire to critique anti-Japanese racism in the United States. Having grown up in California and graduated from Stanford University, she was certainly aware of the depth of the state’s anti-Japanese movement. Her comments suggest that she found affirmation of her Japanese heritage at the fair and a place to be proud of her identity. The chance to speak at the ICWWPPP allowed her to voice those sentiments to a larger audience, as well as to find common ground with other Japanese and Japanese American women.
China, too, captured the attention of conference attendees. Conference organizer Sewall echoed the sentiments voiced by many participants when she praised China’s inherently peaceful culture. “The doctrine of peace has been incorporated in the very nature of the Chinese people for centuries,” she noted, in a comment that might have been intended as a contrast to the perceived militarism of the Japanese.78
Madame Chen spoke for China. She did not draw on Christian principles in her talk; instead, she referred to the legacy of Confucian teachings for the Chinese devotion to peace. Although a plea for peace, her speech contained veiled references to China’s relationship with Japan, as well as with European imperial powers, when she noted that “in the past China’s peaceful intentions have been totally ignored.” Yet, she hastened to praise the United States for its role in assisting China in recent years.79 Given that her audience was one of women concerned with international relations and peace, likely many would have understood her oblique references to the contemporary tensions with Japan. This conference offered Chen an opportunity to represent her home nation to an international audience and to offer comments, however veiled, on China’s desire for peace with Japan, as well as in Europe. She also referred to China’s years of subservience to foreign powers and its renewed attempts—as a newly constituted republic—to assert its independence from old pseudo-colonial relationships.
The varied activities of women on the fairgrounds offer us our last insight into the forces that shaped the PPIE. Visitors found no designated Woman’s Building at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, but they did encounter visions of society that politically minded women carefully crafted. Despite fair officials’ attempts to confine women to the role of hostess, women boldly asserted their newfound political power and agitated for social and political reforms both at home and abroad. As they did so, they revealed the extent to which current political issues bled onto the fairgrounds. No matter what their intent, fair officials could not keep progressive ideas about city development, race relations, social reform, international affairs, or women’s rights from repeatedly intruding onto the grounds. The result was a spectacularly diverse vision of California, the United States, and the Pacific, one that greeted all who entered the gates of the fair.