The Way We Were: Gender and the Woman’s Pavilion, HemisFair ’68

An artistic rendering of the Woman’s Pavilion at HemisFair ’68. San Antonio Fair, Inc., Records, 1962–1995 (bulk 1964–1968) MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

In 1968, Texas hosted HemisFair, the first official world’s fair held in the southwestern United States. In the making for ten years, it required support from Governor John Connally, U.S. Representative Henry B. González, U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough, and President Lyndon Johnson to become a reality. In San Antonio, where the fair took place, businessmen like H. B. Zachry were among those who saw it as an investment in the city’s and the state’s economic future. Together, they raised more than $150 million to fund it.¹

The fair theme was the “Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” and more than forty countries and corporations participated. Most of them sponsored substantial pavilions: the U.S. Pavilion alone sat on 4.5 acres. But the largest of them all belonged to the state of Texas: the Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC) was a 150,000 square-feet, three-story rectangle of reinforced concrete, cement, and Texas limestone built at a cost of $6.5 million, and it sat on almost fourteen acres of ground.²

The current condition of the Woman’s Pavilion. Photo by Nancy Baker Jones.

As the massively financed engine of HemisFair roared into action, a group of women in San Antonio discussed the feasibility of adding a pavilion that had not been included in the original plans—a $2 million mid-century-modern “home” dedicated to telling “the exciting story of the contributions of women to the Americas.”³ Although these women were arguably the city’s most influential, the Woman’s Pavilion they built stands in stark contrast to the celebration of Texas that the rest of HemisFair represented. While the fair is remembered in the massive architecture that survives—the ITC, the Tower of the Americas, and the drum-shaped federal courthouse—the Woman’s Pavilion, which also survives, is now a graffiti-marked shell tucked in the shadow of the Tower of the Americas and largely forgotten.

One might ask why, because there has been historical interest in gender and world’s fairs since the 1970s, and the HemisFair Woman’s Pavilion is one of the few still standing.⁴ As symbols, women’s pavilions can be called public expressions of “the female” in relation to a masculine state. It is important to remember that there have been no officially sanctioned world’s fairs created and run by women, nor have there been any men’s pavilions. Clearly, the context within which all woman’s pavilions have existed is within masculinized cultures.⁵ One might assume a feminist consciousness at work in them, but, as Nancy Cott has pointed out, female activity, even when undertaken in the name of women’s interests, is not necessarily feminist. Female consciousness, while aware of gender differences, can favor conserving as well as challenging male-controlled systems.⁶

The first woman’s pavilion was built in Philadelphia in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition, but only because a nationwide group of women led by Benjamin Franklin’s great-granddaughter protested their having been left out of the fair and raised the money. Coming just one century after the American Revolution, which had ignited debate over women’s citizenship, this pavilion acknowledged both conservative and reform views, and it became a forum for discussing woman suffrage.⁷

The Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition is also well known. It was the first directed by women, the first with exhibits exclusively by and about women, and the first designed by a female architect. The building’s Board of Lady Managers represented every state and a growing nationwide network of women’s clubs, through which they paid for the building, collected the artifacts that filled...