North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Sallie Southall Cotten: Organized Womanhood Comes to North Carolina

213 Sallie Southall Cotten Organized Womanhood Comes to North Carolina Margaret Supplee Smith    “Here I am! again in Chicago to attend a special session of the Board of Lady Managers where I have the privilege of again serving in Mrs. Kidder’s place. . . . It is like a dream, like an Arabian Nights tale, this wonderful city of all nations— with its buildings grand within and without—glittering in the sun and holding veritably the treasures of the earth.” Brimming with enthusiasm and high expectations , wife of a Confederate veteran, and mother of nine, forty-seven-yearold Sallie Southall Cotten began the journal she kept faithfully from July 7 to November 3, 1893, during her stay at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition , where she served as an alternate member of the Board of Lady Managers (blm) and custodian of North Carolina’s Colonial Exhibition. Within a day of her arrival, she toured “La Rabida,” the replica of the Spanish monastery from which Columbus embarked for the new world that was Spain’s exhibition hall, participated in two tumultuous meetings of the lady managers, heard a lieder concert, saw a parade, attended receptions at the New York State and Californian buildings, met the secretary of the Navy and a famous African traveler, made new friends, and ascertained that the Virginia Dare desk she had commissioned for the fair arrived safely and looked good in its prominent place in the blm boardroom. Sallie Cotten was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans from all sections of the country who experienced the 1893 international fair, widely considered a “watershed”—a historic divide between an agricultural America and a modern industrial one. It was a celebration of American unity and “coming of age” on the international economic, political, and cultural stage. It was also Sallie Southall Cotten’s exposition pass This official pass permitted Cotten daily access to the World’s Columbian Exposition during her four-month sojourn in Chicago in 1893. From the Sallie Southall Cotten Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sallie Southall Cotten 215 a defining moment in the late nineteenth-century American women’s movement that gave organized white middle-class women visibility, ambition, and just plain confidence—a suitable climax to what has been called the “Women’s Century.” In the words of Bertha Honoré Palmer, president of the blm, spoken at the dedication of the Woman’s Building: “Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the general government has just discovered women.” Sallie Southall Cotten also discovered the power of women at the 1893 World’s Fair. Her experiences in Chicago transformed this North Carolina woman by introducing her to a national culture of “organized women.” She then promulgated “club work” for more than thirty years, in the process becoming known as North Carolina’s “Mother of Clubs” and transforming women’s influence and impact in the state. The energy and resolve she experienced at the Woman’s Building guided her conviction to unite women and create a public role for their perspective and concerns in North Carolina and in the New South. As her first modern biographer William Stephenson writes, she left her Pitt County home as a country wife and mother and returned as a public figure. After her summer in Chicago, historian Anne Firor Scott observes, “Cotten came home to launch a career that would last the rest of her life.” Anastatia Sims concurs that the fair “awakened her to the potential power of organized womanhood.” Sims notes, “For Cotten, as for Kidder, that experience created new opportunities. She became an enthusiastic supporter of women’s clubs and devoted the rest of her life to promoting them in North Carolina.” Emily Herring Wilson writes of that summer when Sallie Cotten “saw a new world made up of changing colors and patterns. The old world was the farm in eastern North Carolina, and the new was the architectural splendor of the Chicago’s World Fair.” We know from Sallie Southall Cotten’s almost-daily journal entries what she did during her extended sojourn in Chicago, whom she saw, where she went, what she experienced, and often what she thought and felt. After years living at Cottendale, an isolated farm near Greenville, she left her husband and seven-year-old daughter Elba back home and...