Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women's Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair

By Miki Pfeffer

Women from all over the country came to New Orleans in 1884 for the Woman's Department of the Cotton Centennial Exposition, that portion of the World's Fair exhibition devoted to the celebration of women's affairs and industry. Their conversations and interactions played out as a drama of personalities and sectionalism at a transitional moment in the history of the nation. These women planted seeds at the Exposition that would have otherwise taken decades to drift southward.

This book chronicles the successes and setbacks of a lively cast of postbellum women in the first Woman's Department at a world's fair in the Deep South. From a wide range of primary documents, Miki Pfeffer recreates the sounds and sights of 1884 New Orleans after Civil War and Reconstruction. She focuses on how difficult unity was to achieve, even when diverse women professed a common goal. Such celebrities as Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony brought national debates on women's issues to the South for the first time, and journalists and ordinary women reacted. At the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, the Woman's Department became a petri dish where cultures clashed but where women from across the country exchanged views on propriety, jobs, education, and suffrage. Pfeffer memorializes women's exhibits of handwork, literary and scientific endeavors, inventions, and professions, but she proposes that the real impact of the six-month-long event was a shift in women's self-conceptions of their public and political lives. For those New Orleans ladies who were ready to seize the opportunity of this uncommon forum, the Woman's Department offered a future that they had barely imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626743939

Miki Pfeffer

Miki Pfeffer is an independent researcher and native New Orleanian whose work has appeared in the Encyclopedia of World's Fairs and Expositions and in journals such as the Louisiana Historical Journal and La Creole.

Book preview

Southern Ladies and Suffragists

Southern Ladies and Suffragists

Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair

MIKI PFEFFER

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2014

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pfeffer, Miki.

Southern ladies and suffragists : Julia Ward Howe and women’s rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair / Miki Pfeffer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-134-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62846-135-0 (ebook) 1. Women’s rights—Southern States—History. 2. Suffragists—Southern States—History. 3. Howe, Julia Ward, 1819–1910. 4. World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (1884–1885 : New Orleans, La.) I. Title.

HQ1236.5.U6P45 2014

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For my late parents, who would have been proud,

and my daughter Gretchen, who is a strong-minded woman

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Part One: Women and the City

1. What the Ladies Were Saying

2. The Principals

3. An Immense Responsibility

4. The Locals

5. A City for Women

Part Two: The Stage Is Set; The Fair Begins

6. The Chiefdom

7. Thimbles and a Teapot

8. Great Expectations

9. Work, the New Gospel of Womanhood

10. February Festivities

Part Three: Triumphs and Turmoils

11. Opening at Last

12. When Powerful Women Came to Town

13. Exhibits Great and Small

14. April Showers of Reproach

15. May Distractions

16. Final Battles

17. Endings

Afterthoughts

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Dr. Madelon Powers was the alpha and omega of this project. Despite all the academic demands put on her as head of the History Department at the University of New Orleans, she has been my mentor and friend, consistently offering good cheer and wise tips. I also thank Anne Boyd Rioux, Martha Ward, and Connie Atkinson, who offered advice along the way. This force of these smart women freed me to tell the story of the remarkable characters herein.

No research is accomplished without the assistance of informed librarians and archivists. I especially want to thank Wilbur E. Bill Meneray, retired assistant dean of Tulane University’s Special Collections, who set me on this path by putting Julia Ward Howe’s Report and Catalogue in my hands. Susan Tucker, curator at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, introduced me to journalist Catharine Cole’s papers and encouraged me throughout. I thank the savvy conductors at the Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection, who guided me through obscure photographs and standing files and who made special efforts on my behalf: senior curator John Magill, curator Daniel Hammer, reference assistants Robert Ticknor, Jennifer Navarre, Sally Stassi, and the entire knowledgeable staff. Thanks also to archivist Anne Case at the Tulane Special Collections for painstaking searches, to executive director Mamie Sterkx Gasperecz at Hermann-Grima/Gallier Houses for sharing an invaluable connection, and to curator Anke Tonn at Nicholls State University for being my link to wonderful interlibrary loans.

Farther afield, I thank the willing guides at Harvard and Brown Universities, at Radcliffe College, and at the New York and Boston Public Libraries for steering me through those unfamiliar territories. I am indebted to Nancy Whipple Grinnell for her hospitality in Newport, Rhode Island, and for making sure I had access to Maud Howe’s papers and other Howe family archives. Collector Kenneth Speth has been unsparingly generous in sharing his historical photographs of world’s fairs. I am grateful to Kate Stickley and Toni Bacon, descendants of Julia Ward Howe and Martha Field/Catharine Cole respectively, for supporting the way I portrayed their foremothers. Kate’s kindnesses and friendship continue to enhance this work and my life.

Naturally, no book is worth its pages without able editors. I am grateful to editor-in-chief Craig Gill and editorial assistant Katie Keene at the University Press of Mississippi for directing my path through the process, to Norman Ware for exquisite copyediting, and to the peer readers for their constructive suggestions. Of course, any failings or ambiguities in these pages are my own,

To friends and scholars who encouraged me, thank you all, especially Elaine Showalter, Raphael Cassimere, Beth Willinger, Patricia Brady, Cristina Vella, Kate Adams, Chris Wiltz, and Susan Larson. And to my husband, Ron Rowland, for enduring years of my absorption in the ideas and actions of nineteenth-century women.

Preface

March 3, 1885. What have women ever invented? tiny Julia Ward Howe osked in her broad "a Boston accent. Then she answered the impertinent question by gesturing to scores of objects that proved women could indeed contribute to industry. Howe also pointed to scientific specimens, silk-culture processes, published works, and other evidence. Truth be told, these exalted examples of women’s productivity had to vie for attention with rather amateurish needlework and curiosities. Surrounding the gathered audience were display cases and boudoir-curtained booths that fairly teemed with incompatible items. A dainty pincushion sat near a sturdy iron chain from a female blacksmith; a glut of crazy quilts hung near a collapsible summer house from a Chicago woman’s design. Despite the incongruous mix, these were the best examples of woman’s work" that representatives from all participating states could collect on short notice.

At three o’clock that Tuesday afternoon in New Orleans, Julia Ward Howe was formally opening the Woman’s Department at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. As the department’s president, Howe stood behind a flower-bedecked podium on a small platform, her manner dignified and full of grit. With sparkling dark eyes, a strong but rather florid face, and a lace cap perched on her silken white hair, she was very like old Queen Victoria. In fact, she was of an age that one feared when saying au revoir to her, it might well be adieu. Or so a local journalist had written. For now, however, in a voice small but sweet, Howe pronounced: The world remains very imperfectly educated concerning its women. Although woman’s hand and brain was everywhere in the great industrial exhibits at this World’s Fair, those efforts were lost when incorporated with the work of men. This separate department, if it achieved its aims, might correct misconceptions about woman’s role in the marketplace. So Julia Ward Howe, the little lady from the North, ignored women’s recent nattering and optimistically named that March day a smile in the crown of many weeks of harmonious labor. It was true that harmony had been elusive, but at least the opening of the Woman’s Department commenced with the glow of a society fête.¹

Exhibitors brought what they thought was validation of women’s achievements in the public sphere as well as in the home. And already, as designated Lady Commissioners worked on displays, the department had become a place to exchange convictions, tactics, and dreams. For the first time in the South, the broadest spectrum of the nation’s women were coming together to have a big say. In a country still divided after war and reconstruction, this was a fragile opportunity for reconciliation, and women in the know realized that they were experiencing a defining moment. Ambitious women surely glimpsed the possibility of a different future. This Woman’s Department at a world’s fair in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans should have been one for the history books; it was not. To miss it entirely, however, is to lose a significant marker in women’s striving toward recognition, independence, and influence.

Southern Ladies and Suffragists

Loyal and beautiful, the Southern queen / Bids the wide world welcome to her door . . . World’s International Cotton Centennial Exposition. Centerfold from Puck, a popular weekly humor magazine, suggests that New Orleans and its people are about to capture worldwide attention during the six-month extravaganza. Puck as Uncle Sam helps Miss New Orleans greet all nations, symbolically represented as women. Examples of exhibits can be seen at the right, and the icon of the Exposition—Horticultural Hall—is in the background. The American flag flies as evidence of a united country. Courtesy of the Collections of the Louisiana State Museum, acc. #1996.001.17.11.

Introduction

In the nineteenth century, exhibitions like the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition billed themselves as utopian spectacles of current glories and future prospects. In actuality, they revealed more about the ideology and identity of the people who created them than about external reality. Male organizers framed the events, in part, to help assuage fears in a troubled world of booms, busts, and unsettling changes. They painted rosy forecasts wherein political consensus, emerging science, and daring industry would solve the era’s problems; they imposed a kind of order on chaos by arranging row upon row of precisely categorized objects. White men decided the overall goals and messages. At best, they considered women and people of color as beneficiaries of these enterprises, when considered at all.¹

In New Orleans in 1884, a party of determined businessmen and politicians fashioned the Cotton Centennial Exposition in their own image. The event was to be a harbinger of a New South. After the Civil War and Congressional Reconstruction, this new version of the South sought reunion and earnestly solicited northern-led industrialization to develop its natural resources. The label New South was the brainchild of a small group of publishers and merchants who combined wishful thinking with calculating opportunism. Enthusiasts of the emerging ideology touted reconciliation and racial harmony as if these had already been accomplished, but such notions were more conceptual than tangible in a culture still largely devoted to an Old South. Henry W. Grady, owner of the Atlanta Constitution, was the New South movement’s chief zealot; Edward Austin Burke, owner of the Times-Democrat (New Orleans) and now the director-general of the World’s Fair, was the local mythmaker-in-chief. If the Exposition’s propaganda succeeded, it could lure men, money, and machines to the entire southern region. In a city badly in need of financial rejuvenation and a revived status, the event might also resuscitate the flagging economy and rescue the floundering Port of New Orleans.²

On the face of it, the Cotton Centennial was mounted to commemorate a hundred years of exporting southern cotton. But one of its major missions was to sooth the qualms of northern businessmen who might otherwise be skittish about investing in a problematic South. Thus, it marketed sectional goodwill and tranquil race relations. As a further balm, the fair’s Board of Management decided to include a Woman’s Department and a Colored Department, and it plucked two celebrated national figures to preside over them: activist Julia Ward Howe and former United States senator Blanche Kelso Bruce, respectively. Once the two departments were designated, however, women and people of color assumed agency over their exhibits and activities. They shaped their own meanings, and occasionally they deviated from the official script.

In the Woman’s Department, matters sometimes bordered on the dramatic as homemakers, clubwomen, and professionals from across the country competed, collaborated, and frequently disagreed. While the exhibits were fairly impressive, the department was more important as a space of intersecting opinions, as participants and visitors sought to persuade each other and form new alliances. Individuals spoke for themselves, of course, but some common themes emerged. Spirited women sought to redefine woman’s work and remove barriers to their accomplishments, employment, and higher education.

As southerners interacted with women from other regions, including sturdy pioneers from western territories, the boldest among them considered progressive ideas that, without the Woman’s Department, might have taken decades to drift southward. The winds of national movements wafted into traditional social and doctrinal patterns. And because of the potent conference that the Woman’s Department provided, more than a few self-identified ladies of the South were obliged to question their presumptions about strong-minded women from the North and West.

The Woman’s Department provided New Orleans ladies with their first collective exchange with national activists, whom they had heretofore dreaded, snubbed, rejected, or simply not known. Between mid-December 1884 and the end of May 1885, attentive women gained new opportunities to insinuate their voices into debates on women’s issues, even if they eschewed organized movements. During the six months of the World’s Fair, some individuals began to understand that newfound strategies and collaborative efforts could serve their own agendas long after the exhibits were dismantled. Caroline Merrick, perhaps the city’s lone declared suffragist, called the experience an enlarging influence on future endeavors.³ Despite the persistence of certain sectional rivalries and personality clashes, women created a tenuous sisterhood of common cause in the Woman’s Department in the somewhat tattered Queen City of the South. This book chronicles that journey.

Although local and visiting women affected the course of the Woman’s Department, Julia Ward Howe was its linchpin. She was also its irritant. As a venerable luminary in the Northeast, Howe basked in sunny deference wherever she went in that distant region; as a stranger in a southern land, she often received as little reverence as a bone-chilling winter day. Controversy that swirled around her exposed local biases. The stuff of drama lurks in Howe’s postmortem Report and Catalogue of the Woman’s Department, where this research began. She complains there of animadversion from local women of the press while in New Orleans. She carps that the Exposition’s director-general, Edward A. Burke, denied her rebuttal space in his Times-Democrat for fear of a newspaper war with the rival Daily Picayune. She employs the Report and Catalogue as a refutation of certain criticisms about her leadership.⁴

Howe’s defiant comments piqued my curiosity. What were the details of this onslaught, I wondered, and what prompted such intense reaction to this famous figure? What mission had she assumed, and how well had she performed it? And why, in the first place, had promoters of a New South exposition chosen a northern abolitionist and suffragist to lead a Woman’s Department in the old Deep South? From the evidence available, I argue that in spite of the adverse reactions that Julia Ward Howe aroused, her skills and unflagging resolve made her a smart choice. She was generally a successful leader, but the harmony she professed among women was as slippery as a silken bonnet string; it invariably came undone. Yet, the Woman’s Department at the Cotton Centennial Exposition, more than any other occasion in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, provoked an awakening in women who dared to be open to it.

World’s fairs were invariably local affairs, despite how strongly their developers boasted of international participation. In New Orleans, social and political matters intruded on promoters’ best-laid plans. Conventions of race, gender, class, and region sometimes contradicted otherwise coherent commercial and scientific aims. The ambitions and personalities of newspaper owners and journalists influenced how the news was presented. Especially relevant to women’s issues at the Cotton Centennial was that a woman owned and published the popular Daily Picayune. Eliza Holbrook Nicholson had assumed control of the major daily in 1876 as a youngish widow, and by 1884 she had increased its circulation considerably. Innovative pages for women and children and her own society column made the Picayune a family paper with an ardent female readership.

Like Director-General Burke in his Times-Democrat, Eliza Nicholson fully supported the Cotton Centennial Exposition as the World’s University and as a boon to the region. Yet, the Picayune paid special attention to how the event affected women as well as men. Vast displays of engines and machines in the main halls might appeal mainly to male viewers, but marvelous new technology for the home also promised better lives for the entire family. Journalists foretold how electric lights, sewing machines, typewriters, telephones, elevators, and elevated railways would benefit women; how mass entertainment and new taste treats would delight them; how new drudgery-reducing products would entice them. About the Woman’s Department, especially, newswomen highlighted displays of many new fields of employment, so sorely needed. Most important, the Picayune raised pertinent questions of the Woman’s Department while it detailed every triumph and woe. Women had much to say about the culture of this World’s Fair, and, consciously or inadvertently, they muddled the reconciliation messages that developers had so carefully crafted. In other instances, some women took the promises of a New South further than male creators of the notion probably intended.

Questions tumbled out of my early investigation of the Woman’s Department. If progress was a major goal of this Cotton Centennial Exposition, did the all-male Board of Management realize how that initiative might alter traditional covenants between southern white ladies and the men in their lives? What was it about the milieu of New Orleans that made it a likely setting for visiting women to present their advanced ideas? On the other hand, how did racial attitudes constrict progress? Did women knowingly contradict themselves in this transitional period between civil war and a new century? Moreover, in an age obsessed with machines and merchandise, would women be able to prove their competence beyond domesticity? Could disparate women reconcile their differences enough to make a harmonious show? These queries drove my research.

This book attempts to show how the event became a watershed moment in persuading a coterie of late-nineteenth-century white ladies to trade illusory pedestals for broader vistas, to enlarge notions of acceptable womanhood, and even to contemplate organized suffrage. Perhaps the Board of Management inadvertently created the impetus. They granted authority to militant causes when they chose Julia Ward Howe to lead the Woman’s Department. Then, bold newspaperwomen amplified the political nature of the department by publicizing every nuance and provoking repeated debates. Meanwhile, famous national leaders of women’s organizations saw the Exposition’s public platform as an opportunity previously unavailable. During a six-month period in a southernmost city, a nationwide network of women—both famous and unexceptional—devised alternative strategies and celebrated common victories.

The backdrop for celebration and change at the Cotton Centennial was the purposely gendered space of the Woman’s Department, a strategy of separateness that these white women used to meet their goals. Women of color, who originally wished to show with their gender, instead exhibited with their race in the Colored Department, the first such space offered to people of color at a world’s fair. Each of the two departments offered exhibitors and leaders a place to prove they were capable of contributing to industry. Of course, as both groups readily admitted, they first had to disprove the commonly held view that they were incapable of full partnership in a marketplace so highly prized. Toward that end, each group seized a measure of agency and controlled its own messages during the Exposition.⁵

The two distinct departments served the participants’ political end of public acknowledgment. Yet, the separate arrangement also created a quandary for women and people of color. Much of their best work—from textiles and tobacco to factories, farms, and inventions—was shown elsewhere, depriving their own spaces of important categories of achievement. Critics and supporters alike noted the paradox. When reviewing the Woman’s Department for Century Magazine, for example, journalist Eugene V. Smalley conceded that woman’s finest work was too entangled with that of man in general exhibits to be recognized for its own merit. He further granted that even the student work that was shown in the nearby Educational Department was in reality woman’s work. About the Woman’s Department generally, Smalley judged its pretty alcoves as admirable and peaceful places but its displays of needlework and ornamentals as elaborate trifles from genteel hands, examples of woman’s play rather than woman’s work. It was a criticism often debated during those six months.⁶

Women of color faced additional challenges by being twice removed. Leaders of the Colored Ladies Exposition Committee of New Orleans met with the local Christian Woman’s Exchange and with Julia Ward Howe to place exhibits in the Woman’s Department instead of being scattered promiscuously among men’s work. White women probably rebuffed the idea; black men probably convinced the women that their exhibits were needed in the Colored Department. Perhaps both. Newswomen regularly detailed and complimented women’s displays in the Colored Department, but otherwise women of color are somewhat invisible in this account. They were without apparent storms of controversy and without a partisan newspaper to report their personal opinions. One journalist, for example, claimed that participants and visitors of color mingled freely on the grounds, but there was no viable race paper in New Orleans in 1884 to contradict such statements. Nor was there any published commentary from the active community of Creoles of color, so outspoken in earlier and later periods.⁷

The dilemma of separate spaces at the Cotton Centennial Exposition was also a reflection of questions of gender, race, and economics in the larger society, as Smalley’s comments imply. What value would be placed on the work of women and people of color in this paean to science, engineering, and industry? Further, as the veneer of equal treatment was being stripped away from people of color and as financial responsibility was pushing more women into outside employment, both groups needed public endorsement of their efforts. Whether women accepted traditional alliances with men of their region and race or pushed for more, whether they sought new employment to support their families or demanded real positions of leadership, southern women were walking the finest of lines in an imagined New South. This book traces the intricacies of their predicament.⁸

A vibrant circle of personalities important to the Woman’s Department emerges from the rich storehouse of archives around New Orleans. Memoirs, eulogies, and intimate correspondence undergird the profiles here of journalist Catharine Cole at the Picayune and her employer Eliza Nicholson, of clubwomen Caroline Merrick and Caroline Walmsley, of aspiring writer Grace King and established poet Mary Ashley Townsend. Their papers reveal complex women being coquettish and professional, domestic and public, gossipy and philanthropic. Real-time newspaper reports and bountiful records of women’s groups flesh out the personal and organizational details. Reports of the Southern Art Union, for example, suggest a financially strapped association sometimes adrift about its teaching mission. Minutes of the Christian Woman’s Exchange show a successful business operation upholding a mission to keep impoverished women from beggary and sin by marketing their jams, jellies, pies, needlework, and family heirlooms.⁹

No local woman left a private cache of papers as rich as that of Julia Ward Howe, however, even if the specific communiqués that engaged her for the Woman’s Department still elude me. Howe wrote only sparingly in her journals while in New Orleans, but she spent forty-seven years logging public actions and private musings. In the course of that time, she registered what she was reading, writing, and planning; she worried about family members and relived the pleasures of games, concerts, and the sisterhood of her beloved New England Woman’s Club. She fretted a little over clashes with erstwhile activists but much over her own shortcomings. She praised and critiqued ministers’ sermons and gauged her own successes and failures by how audiences responded to her homilies. She feared she might leave debt for her children. She mourned the loss of family and friends, especially the death of Sammy, the youngest of her six children, the point at which in 1863 she began regularly keeping a journal. In addition to these unpublished treasures and an abundant stash of letters, Howe also left published poems, plays, essays, travelogues, sermons, and a memoir. Her daughters wrote a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of their mother, and family members also left numerous papers that reveal other aspects of this celebrated and complicated woman.¹⁰

Local newspapers of 1884 and 1885 documented every detail of Howe’s activities in New Orleans as they reported the minutiae of the entire Exposition. Rival morning dailies, the Times-Democrat and the Picayune, ran lengthy columns every day that itemized the exhibits and itineraries of the World’s Exposition, but only the Picayune was fully invested in the disputes that plagued the Woman’s Department and often reported them with political and cultural bluntness. Meanwhile at the Times-Democrat, ambitious Director-General Edward Burke insisted on the New South’s gospel of harmony and union; he allowed no controversy to mar the Exposition’s image or his own. Instead, glowing reports and self-congratulatory tributes filled the pages of his newspaper. Conversely, the contrarian Mascot sniffed out every hint of scandal and corruption. The scathing satirical weekly regularly rebuked Major E. A. Burke for crony politics, Louisiana Lottery connections, and questionable financial practices as chief of the Exposition and, concurrently, as state treasurer of Louisiana. Each Saturday, a political cartoon covered the entire front page of the Mascot; inside, caricatures further censured the exploits of targeted individuals. When this ribald tabloid occasionally commented on a fracas in the Woman’s Department or when it derided the leadership of Republican politicos in the Colored Department, it often did so gleefully through mock columnists with caricaturing dialects.¹¹

As public institutions, these English-language newspapers reflected and also shaped perceptions and expectations in New Orleans, as did the French, German, and Spanish press for their populations in the diverse city. The Picayune avoided the kind of lurid exposés that the Mascot relished, cleaving to its mantle of family newspaper. It leaned more toward civic reform than did the Times-Democrat but never with the fury of the Mascot. A third daily, the afternoon Daily States, was weaker in features and advertising but stronger in advocacy for working men, even if it generally ignored the needs of working women. Only the Mascot challenged the corrupting Louisiana Lottery, however; other papers courted the sweepstake’s advertising dollars. Both the Picayune and the Times-Democrat claimed the largest circulation in the South, with some parsing. Both sought broad appeal with Sunday theater reviews, poetry, correspondents in New York or Boston, and columns for women and children. The Times-Democrat included a bit more serialized literary fiction that women might have enjoyed, but largely its features offered no serious competition for the Society Bee or Woman’s World and Work columns in the Picayune. These columns, by Eliza Nicholson and Catharine Cole respectively, garnered a large female following.¹²

In addition to daily reports on the World’s Exposition, each of the three English-language dailies assigned a female journalist to cover women’s work at the Cotton Centennial. I treat these views as a kind of truth of their time while also recognizing that the newswomen’s versions also layer irony on the history presented here. Journalists, after all, deduced and inferred from their own life experiences, as do I. Particularly important to the story here is Martha Reinhard Field, pseudonymously Catharine Cole. As a salaried employee of the Picayune, she was the city’s most fervent campaigner for working women, especially when it came to equal pay for equal work. In addition to her regular coverage of news, Cole’s Woman’s World and Work and Sunday Talk columns urged women to go to work, polish their manners, appreciate their families, demand respect for work well done, and grant the same to others.¹³

Cole lifted the veil on late-nineteenth-century attitudes in New Orleans but with her own biases. Nevertheless, without her, this study would be bereft of a voice of candor in a region that favored ladylike decorum and obliqueness over public and political frankness. I admire Cole’s fidelity to her profession, her insistence that southern women be acknowledged, and her unwavering resolve that working women be taken seriously. I am also amused that she fearlessly jousted with as renowned a figure as Julia Ward Howe. On the other hand, her opinions were often harsh, and I applaud Howe’s warranted defense of self. I admire her determination to make her own way despite, by all accounts, an imperious husband. I appreciate her tenacity and commitment to causes she thought worthy. In a way, Cole seems a provocateur by design, Howe almost by virtue. I am also fascinated by other zealots who added their energy and spunk to the Woman’s Department. Because they all took women’s activities and opinions seriously, this is a narrative of feminism before women used the term.

This book stitches together the aforementioned sources into a version of women’s experience in a particular time and place. Although the Cotton Centennial Exposition was fleeting and temporary, it impacted New Orleans, a city in which populations were struggling to reestablish footholds after a period of war, economic deprivation, and social upheaval. For six months beginning in December 1884, women had an opportunity to define themselves in relation to local and national issues and to each other. Because the Exposition had a beginning and an end, I track a largely chronological unfolding of this heretofore untold story. In it, southern women and strangers from the Northeast, Midwest, Pacific Slope, and distant western territories meet and compete. They struggle to present a united front, although they share a mission: to proclaim women’s value in an industrializing nation. During the time of the World’s Exposition, women from disparate regions discovered that they were surprisingly similar in some cases and startlingly dissimilar in others.

This investigation traces what they proposed, resisted, welcomed, and disputed as they convened in the