Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women's Labor in 1898 (review)

As Antoinette Burton writes in the introduction to Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898: “the last half of the nineteenth century was not just ‘the age of exhibitions’; it was the high noon of imperial spectacle as well.” (1) Since the 1980s, cultural historians of imperialism have turned their attention to nineteenth-century exhibitions and museums, arguing that they offered contemporary Europeans powerful ways to imagine colonies and colonial hierarchies. In their study of the Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in the Hague in 1898, which included significant exhibits on Dutch colonialism, Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk eschew the Foucauldian approach to the study colonial exhibitions pioneered by Timothy Mitchell. Instead they adopt the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as modified by the critique of Nancy Fraser. Fraser argued that “Habermas was wrong to assume that the nineteenth-century bourgeois public sphere constituted the only public domain”; instead it consisted of a “a variety of publics and counterpublics”, with such domains “often in opposition to the dominant bourgeois public sphere”. (15) The authors contend that the National Exhibition of Women’s Labor is an example of a counterpublic because “new actors participated in this counterpublic”. For the first time in Dutch history middle-class women independently organized an exhibition and working-class women spoke in public. Furthermore, Grever and Waaldijk assert that “the exhibition shifted both the form and content of the debate about gender and society.” (15) Chapter seven, “Creating a Counterpublic”, which outlines the plans, contents and debates of the twelve conferences and additional meetings and addresses that the organizers laid on in the summer of 1898 as part of the exhibition, convincingly illustrates the women’s “counterpublic” in action. Middle-class Dutch feminists spoke publicly, raised funds, managed conflicts, “mastered” logistics, visited factories, sweatshops, hospitals and schools, and corresponded with women from across “the far reaches of the Dutch colonial empire”. (215) As Grever and Waaldijk explain, “women determined the form and content of a national exhibition in the Netherlands, the first that had explicitly aimed to heighten the visibility of women and their roles in society.” (215) And in the longer term, the public sphere was changed even more radically, with the hiring of women supervisors, the appointment of a woman as deputy inspector of labor, and the admission of female students to a number of vocational schools. The proceeds from the exhibition were used to set up a National Bureau for Women’s Labor to monitor women’s working conditions, as it did for the next forty years, and the Dutch National Council of Women was formed.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including photographs, artwork and a novel written by one of the organizers this is in many ways an exemplary work of social history. Other than a few infelicities of translation, the main criticism of this book is of its organisational structure. To an English reader it seems frustrating that the very important information on the creation of a “counterpublic” is not provided until chapter seven. The authors also inform us on the penultimate page that “hundreds of people wrote letters in response to questionnaires passed out at the exhibition”, which contained “a myriad of opinions on ‘women’s issues’”. This reader would have liked to have seen those opinions woven more fully throughout the book.

Grever and Waaldijk complete their account by highlighting the limits of the new feminist “counterpublic”. On the very last pages of the book they offer a fascinating reading of their volume’s cover image, a picture of Louise Yda in her headdress, along with two Dutch working women amongst textile machinery in the exhibition’s Hall of Industry. Yda was of African decent, from the Dutch colony of Surinam and she sold...