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8 1 By Invitation Only At 9:30 a.m. on July 21, 1893, members of the American Library Association (ALA) gathered for their seventh conference session in the Woman’s Building, within the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As guests of the Board of Lady Managers (BLM)—the group responsible for the design, construction, and exhibits of the marvelous building in which they were meeting—they sat in the middle of the rotunda on the building’s ground floor. Several BLM members mingled with their ALA guests. That the ALA selected Chicago for its 1893 conference was not surprising. For two years the exposition’s World’s Fair Auxiliary worked hard to convince hundreds of professional associations to choose the Columbian Exposition as a site for their annual conferences; the ALA committed in 1891. Not until June 26, 1893, however, did ALA president Melvil Dewey accept an invitation from Virginia Meredith, chair of the BLM’s Committee of Awards, to hold at least one of its conference sessions in the Woman’s Building. “I will try and make the women specially prominent on that day,” he promised, “and think we can make it be a desirable feature.”1 What particularly interested the ALA members gathered there was the library on the building’s second floor: a unique collection of printed materials written, illustrated, edited, or translated by women from all over the world. Never before had such a collection been assembled. That morning the ALA met in the rotunda to view and commemorate this landmark library. Because the rotunda rose to the full height of the building and was capped with a skylight , many of those attending could glimpse the library’s entrance from where they sat. As the assembled ALA members knew, the library upstairs—sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and twenty feet high—had several functions. Organizers intended that it exhibit books authored by women since 1492, that it serve as a T U 9 By Invitation Only comfortable and aesthetically distinctive gathering place for Woman’s Building visitors, and that through resident librarians it operate as a source of information about women. The ALA, from whose membership resident librarians were drawn, hoped it would model the role women had embraced in pioneering the new professional field of librarianship. These functions were largely complementary; nevertheless, the convergence of the ALA and the BLM at the midpoint of the fair’s six-month run brings into focus competing visions of culture and progress that contended within the public space of the Woman’s Building and in the larger arena of the Columbian Exposition. Nowhere were these competing views more evident than in the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that informed the cultural projects of the Woman’s Building Library and the American Library Association. The women responsible for the creation of the Woman’s Building Library were keenly aware of the unprecedented opportunity the building afforded to spotlight women’s contribution to fine and applied arts, education, family life, service, and other fields in which women had labored. Aware that women’s work had long been undervalued,they were highly attuned to the venue’s enormous advantages, as well as its potential disadvantages. Although the question of whether or not women’s work should be integrated into exhibits throughout the exposition had been hotly contested (see chapter 2), advocates of a special women’s exhibit hall had prevailed. In the end, the decision to erect a special building to house exhibits by and about women reflected a political compromise .While upholding the underlying construction of “True Womanhood,”the exhibits and events held in the Woman’s Building sought to extend the range of women’s domestic activities into the public sphere. As this compromise suggests , both the building’s physical space and the planning and organizing that went into it became a battleground on which conflicting ideas about women and womanhood vied. Like the debate over separate or integrated exhibits, the library’s interior design reflected both a validation of the feminine values associated with separate-sphere ideology—relegating women to the privacy of the home and restricting their participation in public life—and a critique of that ideology. In order to signal the resulting combination of values—femininity, domesticity, and benevolence, but also education, progress, and professionalism—the BLM had paid special attention to the aesthetics of the room. The committee that oversaw the library’s design carefully devised a decor...

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