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  • The Texas Building and the Women’s World’s Fair Exhibit Association of Texas
  • Jeffrey A. Zemler (bio)

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The south façade of the Texas building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893. Courtesy Paul V. Galvin Library Digital History Collection, Illinois Institute of Technology.

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If this great state is to make a creditable exhibit at the world’s Columbian exposition, it must largely depend on the action and energetic co-operation of the women of Texas.” This declaration by Benedette B. Tobin, the newly elected president of the Board of Lady Managers of the Texas World’s Fair Exhibit Association, set the direction and tone for this group of women civic boosters. They had assumed the leadership of the fund-raising effort to erect a building showcasing the Lone Star State at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, after the men had decided to “share” the responsibility with the women. Tobin, ever the optimist, believed that the women of Texas would succeed, because “the raising of a certain sum of money, [is] a thing that most women have a rare faculty of doing, when the need arises.” In the end, she was partially correct about the money. Still, if it had not been for the diligence of these women, Texas would not have had its own building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (often referred to as the Chicago World’s Fair).1

From May 1, 1893, to October 30, 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition was the signal participatory event in the United States, and admissions totaled 27,529,400, one of the largest attendances for any exposition to that date. Even the bitter contest to host the exposition, which the popular press followed in detail, seemed to foreshadow its importance in the public’s imagination. Its central theme of American progress from 1492 likewise captured the attention of the public. Eventually, thirty-six states, four territories, and numerous countries would participate in what [End Page 19] many contemporaries considered the “most stupendous affair of the kind in the whole world’s history.”2

Historians have viewed the World’s Columbian Exposition as an important element in the advancement of women’s issues. The Women’s Building overflowed with displays of women’s achievements in the arts, sciences, and industry and excited the imagination of many visitors. The building, built at a cost of $200,000, was 400 feet long and 200 feet wide and was at times too small to accommodate the crowds that gathered to hear various speakers. Its Board of Lady Managers, not to be confused with the Texas organization, oversaw the Women’s Building construction and management and scheduled the World’s Congress of Representative Women to convene from May 15 to May 22, 1893. A resounding success, the congress presented more than 600 speakers in 67 formal sessions that drew an estimated 150,000 participants. Some of the sessions were so large that they had to be held in the nearby Memorial Arts Building.

Historians have also cast these activities by women as motivational events that invigorated the women’s movement in all regions of the country. Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing argue that “the fair helped position women as a force to be reckoned with in all arenas as the world crossed into the twentieth century.” Since the early 1990s, historians have uncovered new information detailing women’s organizational activity in nineteenth-century Texas. Judith N. McArthur, among other historians, describes the fair as instrumental in the burgeoning political awareness and collective outspokenness of women in Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “It began,” she writes, “with inspiration from the great fair in Chicago in the summer of 1893.” In actuality, this transformative process began two years earlier in Texas with the active personal participation of the women living in the state.3 This essay argues that the [End Page 20] Women’s World’s Fair Exhibit Association of Texas served as a precursor to an explosion of progressive women’s organizational activity, fostered a pattern for women activists to follow, and provided...

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