Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Its Legacy

Chapter 4: Czech Mates: Locating and Gendering the Competing Habsburgian Presences at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893

CZECH MATES 65 Chapter 4 CZECH MATES: Locating and Gendering the Competing Habsburgian Presences at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 SUSAN INGRAM Among the innovations in sites inaugurated at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 were two with links to Austria–Hungary, and with critical implications for gender and modernity: the Midway and the library in the Woman’s Building.This paper details the contrasting forms of female participation in these two inaugural sites in order to establish the seductively emancipatory side of nation-building towards the end of the 19th century. Czechs, and one Czech in particular, Josefa Humpal-Zeman, took advantage of the exposition to promulgate their brand of linguistic nationalism, using the new women’s initiatives to do so.The Austrians, on the other hand, did not pursue national representation, but rather limited themselves to two commercial displays: one of luxury goods in a pavilion in the mammoth Manufactures Building; and the other a refreshment village on the Midway called Altwien (Old Vienna). While “new,” well-educated, nationally minded bourgeois women of various ethnic backgrounds saw in this world’s fair an opportunity to further their own emancipatory agendas, and found in the organizing committees kindred spirits in helping to establish literally international (as opposed to “global”) networks in support of their own gendered national projects, the Midway was marked by an unholy alliance of capital and the Monarchy, which forced women into the service GaMiCE.indb 65 4/6/10 8:00:29 PM 66 GENDER AND MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE sector in a move that uncannily prefigured the post-industrial feminization (and ethnicization) of that sector. By attending,then,to the locations and gendering of competing Habsburgian presences at the Chicago Columbian and, more specifically, to the slippage between monarchical, Austrian, Bohemian, and Viennese forms of participation, this paper demonstrates that in the late 19th century the nationalist struggles so ably examined by Pieter Judson were conducted not only along the Sprachgrenzen (language frontiers) within the empire, but also at temporary exhibitionary sites abroad, such as the Chicago Columbian.This paper does so by examining two key world expositions before Chicago—in order to contextualize and account for the forces that went into the making of,and made possible,the library in the Woman’s Building in Chicago—and then considering the competing Habsburg presences at the Chicago Columbian themselves. Transatlantic Tendencies: The Woman’s Buildings in Vienna and Philadelphia While the library in the Woman’s Building at the Chicago Columbian was a first, the building itself was not.That honour belongs to the Vienna World Exposition of 1873. As Mary Pepchinski relates, this first building to offer a separate space for the products of women’s labour at a world exposition was rather accidental. An exhibit of women’s work was proposed fairly late in the planning of the exposition, after all the spaces in the Main Building had been allocated.Together with another late entry, on “the History of Invention,”this first women’s exhibit was housed in a hastily assembled new building,with a simple wooden frame,which was called the Pavillon der Frauenarbeiten (Pavilion of Women’s Works).The initial plan for this exhibit called for a broad range of objects to be displayed, including fine arts and literary works by both local and foreign women, but the final display, because it was so rushed, consisted “largely of so-called ‘feminine handiwork’—small items, such as needlework, textiles, leather and pearl work—executed by women from all corners of the Austro–Hungarian empire” (Pepchinski). As Pepchinski explains, “feminine handiwork”was not considered to be a high art form and rarely received any remuneration, so the exhibit reinforced a bourgeois ideal of femininity, championing domesticity, marriage, and motherhood over gainful employment. This construction of femininity was reinforced by the painting hung at the entry to the exhibit, which greeted visitors and set the tone for the pavilion as a whole: a GaMiCE.indb 66 4/6/10 8:00:30 PM CZECH MATES 67 copy of Ernst Ludwig Richter’s Die Hausfrau (The Housewife), which depicted “a young mother fondly viewing a group of young children at play” (Pepchinski). This small, hastily assembled exhibition received a disproportionately large amount of publicity for its size and came in for rather a lot of criticism. Many questioned why women continued to...