From the Midway to the Hall of State at Fair Park: Two Competing Views of Women at the Dallas Celebration of 1936

This essay will examine two conflicting and mutually exclusive roles that women played in the Central Centennial Celebration held at Fair Park in Dallas during the summer and fall of 1936.¹ On one hand, the predominantly male planners of the fair exploited female beauty as a selling point for the exposition. On the other hand, women also played significant and more enduring roles in planning and implementing the Dallas exposition. This was most especially the case for women who advanced the cause of art at the exposition.

Exposition planners exploited female beauty by means of publicity, advertising copy, and the creation of public attractions at Fair Park designed to increase attendance by objectifying beautiful women as drawing cards. In so doing, the celebration glorified women as purveyors of sex appeal and created an atmosphere at the centennial exposition that presented them to the public as embodiments of largely male-defined characterizations of femininity. New technical advances by the 1930s in the practices of photojournalism, including more portable cameras and the cost-effective printing of photographic images, along with the widespread coverage of the Dallas exposition by radio broadcasting, sound motion pictures, and other mass circulation media helped to make the objectification of women more explicit than it had previously been in the realm of Texas public relations. This portrayal reinforced the prevailing notions of female beauty of the era.

The impact of women at the Central Centennial Celebration was felt in ways other than through the exploitation of female beauty, too. Female artists, many of them highly educated women of social standing and civic accomplishment, existed apart from the beauty culture objectification of the exposition's public relations and, in retrospect, were a historical contradiction to it. In the larger arena of Texas history, this was consistent with the role that women played in the development of the visual arts in Texas. Female artists in the state during the 1930s used their art and their standing in the state's artistic community as a means to empower themselves socially, politically, and civically, thus advancing all women in the process. They certainly did so at Dallas's Fair Park during the Texas Centennial of 1936 as the exposition served as one of many venues during the 1930s for this evolving process of female empowerment undertaken by women artists during that decade. The centennial at Dallas in 1936 thus presents to the historian a stark example of two mutually exclusive, if not conflicting, roles that women played in the Fair Park exhibition and, by extrapolation, in Texas society at large.

Beyond manifesting two different and self-contradictory viewpoints about women, on a larger canvass the Texas Centennial of 1936 marked a significant, generally positive moment in the economic and cultural development of the state. As historian Patrick Cox has noted, its "multiple events embodied a new 'Texan' image and myth that combined factual and fictional material."² These activities would prove to be especially significant for Dallas because a combination of state and federal funds was allocated to revamp Fair Park into an Art Deco architectural monument for a grand celebration that would be the statewide centerpiece of the centennial. Officially known as the Central Centennial Exposition, this exposition ran from June to November 1936 at Fair Park, east of downtown, constituting one of the major statewide centerpieces of that year's events. Retailer Stanley Marcus, who personally played a role in supporting the exposition, later remarked that the Dallas exposition became a turning point not only in the history of the city, but the entire state. Recalling the tens of thousands of visitors who came to Dallas from the rest of the nation and abroad, Marcus observed: "They came, they looked, they liked it." He further remembered: "They returned to New York and to Chicago and to New Jersey with a clear understanding of where Texas was located and what it was all about."³ The dozens of books and articles written in the intervening three quarters of...