Congress of Women, The World's Columbian Exposition.
The Record Of A Historic Women’s Meeting
[Suffrage]. Eagle, Mary Kavanaugh Olham, ed. The Congress of Women/Held in the Woman’s Building,/World’s Columbian Exposition,/Chicago, U.S.A./With Portraits, Biographies, and Addresses. Published by the Authority of the Board of Lady Managers, Mrs. Bertha M. Honore Palmer, President…Official Edition./Sold Only By Subscription. Philadelphia, Pa.: International Publishing Company, 1893.
Tall, thick 8vo; 824 pp.; frontispiece photograph of “The Women’s Building,” many other illustrations throughout; some pages lightly, evenly sunned, not affecting text; front hinge tender; brown cloth, blind stamped; covers worn, faintly soiled, stamping barely visible; a good copy.
First edition; a massive and detailed record of the proceedings of the 1892-3 meetings of the women’s associations from across the U.S. at the Columbian Exhibition, a fair convened in Chicago to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage. Includes reports and speeches by nearly every living suffragist figure, including Susan B. Anthony, Rev,. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Marie Mott Gage, Julia Ward Howe, Mary S. Lockwood, Alice A. Mitchell, May Wright Sewall, Lucy Stone, etc. Includes hundreds of essays on a vast array of topics of relevance to the women’s movement, from women in Assyrian mythology, to the economic independence of women, to women in ideal government, to women and the Zuni Scalp Ceremonial. Also includes approximately a hundred portraits of contributors, comprising a veritable who’s who in American feminism at the time.
The object of this book is to present an account of some of the most important assemblages of women the world has ever known. As part of the Columbian exhibition, the greatest event of its kind in history, there was a daily gathering of women who, in a great building [the Women’s Building] devoted to their uses, expressed their ideas regarding the social, business and political affairs of humankind…This book reproduces the ideas advanced by these women….It is the record of the most earnest and potential and practical assemblages of women….It is a book that every thoughtful woman and every thoughtful man should possess, and must, from its very quality and the circumstances of its production, be part of the important data of future histories. (Publisher’s preface)
The Columbian Exhibition, held in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage in Chicago from 1892-1893, proved to be a landmark moment for the U.S. women’s movement as well as for the country. The event’s organizers, having learned from the disruptions at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, carefully planned the Columbian Exhibition to include major women’s groups and leaders. In addition, the timing was more propitious than the 1876 event because peace reigned amongst women’s groups after the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association put aside their competitive differences and merged in 1890.
An older and wiser Susan B. Anthony started working behind the scenes on the Columbian Exhibition as early as 1890. Anthony wisely enlisted a diverse Board of Managers for the event that included socialites and wives of Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices as well as the more radical elements. In other words, she constructed a governing board that even anti-suffrage politicians could not entirely ignore. There was also a separate Board of Lady Managers, of whom the most important was the chair, Bertha Honore Palmer, a rare woman who combined her wealthy socialite status with active feminism. A dynamo of energy and business acumen, Palmer appointed a 25 member executive committee that created a highly successful presence for women at the exhibition, with a woman’s hall for displays and meetings during the year-long event. She commissioned a mural by Mary Cassatt that was shipped for display. Exhibits from 47 nations testified to the diversity of women’s lives, a
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