Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair by Miki Pfeffer (review)

In the scholarly world of international exposition history, the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans has barely a toehold. Miki Pfeffer’s book establishes secure ground from which the significance of this ill-starred world’s fair can be better understood and appreciated. Held in New Orleans from December 16, 1884, until June 1, 1885, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the first export of southern cotton in 1784, the exposition was designed to celebrate New Orleans as an emerging industrial center of the New South. This ambition was infamously unrealized, in part due to devastating mismanagement by the exposition’s administration.

Among the many near casualties of this mismanagement was the Woman’s Department. The women leading the way were determined to surpass in significance and scope the Women’s Pavilion at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In hindsight, however, the 1876 Pavilion would not be the germane point of comparison. Given the spectacular success of the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, few scholars or gender historians have bothered to even look at what happened in New Orleans eight years before. Pfeffer’s book alone demonstrates the significance of this world’s fair for women’s history. She documents the disappointments, internal conflicts, and external obstacles that bedeviled the elite and professional women from across the nation who yoked themselves uncomfortably together to create the organizational scaffolding on which a shaky Woman’s Department was belatedly erected, months after the exposition at large had officially opened.

The story Pfeffer recounts about infighting, class-inflected antagonisms, and sectional animosities could have easily become an ahistorical, misogynist bromide about women being unable to get along with one another. Instead, Pfeffer is careful to locate each seemingly interpersonal conflict within a larger historical explanation of its origins and intelligent discussions of key issues as they played out in the lives of those involved. Her analysis leaves no doubt as to the politically significant reasons for the women’s jockeying for power and intense responses to perceived slights. With virtually no other comparable venue available to them to present women’s advancements and explain their rights to inclusion in the modernist project, these women, not surprisingly, fought over every resource and opportunity for self-representation that the exposition provided. And, with the key shots being called from above—in particular the selection of Boston-based Julia Ward Howe as the presiding officer—it is clear why divisions immediately developed between local women and the northern women who formed the Woman’s Department central organizing committee and why these divisions were expressed through regionalist prejudices.

Pfeffer concludes that the failures of the exposition and the disappointments experienced by its organizers were ultimately of less importance than the opportunities the exposition furnished for politicization among the professional and elite sectors of New Orleans women who participated. “[W]hat happened in New Orleans mattered,” Pfeffer tells us, because it brought southern women within reach of the chief political movements promoting women’s interests that were growing in prominence in the nation (p. 213). Pfeffer’s persuasiveness on this point carves out a new niche for this world’s fair within the critical historiography on expositions. But, of more general importance, it serves to remind historians that success—as conventionally conceived—is not, and should not be mistaken for, the measure of historical significance.