“The Woman’s Building Library of the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893” (review)

The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, with its incongruous mix of classical architecture, farm machinery, torpedo ships, ragtime, and carnival rides, attracted over twenty-seven million visitors. Today, the Exposition continues to fascinate, attracting contemporary scholars who see it as a portal to understanding the social, cultural, and economic environment of late nineteenth-century America. Libraries & Culturebuilds on this tradition in its Winter 2006 edition. Six essays by scholars from American studies, history, literature, and information studies examine a particularly interesting Exposition site, the Woman’s Building Library (WBL), with its collection of seven thousand books “authored, illustrated, edited, or translated by women” (1).

As editor Sarah Wadsworth warns in her preface, the Woman’s Building Library presents the scholar with “unusual methodological challenges and obstacles.” At the same time, the collection—or more accurately the shelf list of titles, since the physical collection has been dispersed—also provides “limitless possibilities for research and analysis” (2). The possibilities explored in this issue of Libraries & Cultureare themes of traditional interest to scholars of women’s studies and print culture: the participation of women in the public sphere via writing and publication, and the synergistic coming together of women writers, publishers, and readers with nineteenth-century advances in the production and distribution of printed materials to reflect and/or shape cultural values.

The conversation begins with Angela Sorby’s “Symmetrical Womanhood: Poetry in the Woman’s Building Library,” Candy Gunther Brown’s “Publicizing Domestic Piety: The Cultural Work of Religious Texts in the Woman’s Building Library,” and Bernice E. Gallagher’s “Illinois Women’s Novels at the Woman’s Building Library.” Sorby looks at the work of the poets in the WBL, while Brown analyzes nonfiction titles and the religious themes they contain. Gallagher examines fifty-eight novels written by women from Illinois. All three studies find women assuming new roles in the public sphere as writers, reformers, and social commentators, while still very much tied to older traditions in both the content and style of their work. The literary environment in which they lived is characterized by tension, compromise, contradiction—and promise.

The three remaining essays, Barbara Hochman’s “ Uncle Tom’s Cabinat the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Amina Gautier’s “African American Women’s Writings in the Woman’s Building Library,” and Anne H. Lundin’s “Little Pilgrim’s Progress: Literary Horizons for Children’s Literature,” examine how print materials impact cultural values. Hochman makes a compelling argument in her analysis of the Harriet Beecher Stowe display at the WBL and her comparison of illustrations from two different editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Hochman explains, the 1852 edition, published in antebellum America, carried a strong abolitionist message, while the 1892 edition contained a self-congratulatory narrative of America’s “moral and social progress” (82). Both sets of illustrations reproduced stereotypes of African Americans. Images in the first edition, however, were more positive, while those in the latter strengthened notions that perpetuated continued subordination of African Americans. Gautier also acknowledges the stereotypes presented in printed materials, but she finds them blunted by the African American writers in the WBL, who, working in a variety of genres and topics, found a way “to represent themselves” and “to publicly address and counter prevalent stereotypes” (80).

Finally, Lundin traces the evolution of a genre. In 1893, American culture stood on the “cusp of institutionalizing children’s literature,” and with women as the traditional “caretaker[s], as moral guide[s], and as teacher[s], children’s literature became women’s literature” (135, 140). How did this development fit within the parameters of “the horizons of expectations,” where the reader is as important as the writer (134)? What kind of cultural, social, and literary climate nourished such a development? Lundin erects a complex intellectual framework to explore these and other relevant...