In Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Wanda M. Corn examines “the large group of women who founded, administered, designed, and decorated the Woman’s Building” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (pg. 5). She continues, “That the 1893 Woman’s Building of 1893 is a milestone in the history of American art is reason enough for a closer examination of its entire decorative program. Not only was it the first occasion on which MacMonnies, Cassatt, and other women were able to work on a grand scale, but it was their last and only opportunity to fulfill a public commission. Furthermore, it was the only artistic event of the century in which women, in a loosely formed collective, decorated an entire hall” (pg. 9). She further argues that these images and their rhetoric “contributed to the woman’s emancipation movement at the end of the nineteenth century” (pg. 10). Corn continues, “It would fall to women artists at the Fair to wrest the female body from the male gaze and make it speak to woman’s work, intelligence, and emancipation” (pg. 10). Finally, Corn argues that women’s imaginations were “determined by the separatists activities of the sexes in Gilded Age American culture and the discourses that swirled around late nineteenth-century woman’s culture” (pg. 17). Corn draws extensively upon the work of Robert Rydell and Gail Bederman.
Corn argues, “Women were highly conscious that they were speaking in a separate voice from that of their male colleagues. They produced a woman-centered history of the past and present, a brazen counternarrative to the technological story told so often by men” (pg. 20). While male artists used women as subjects in allegory, “women artists, in contrast, recognizing that classical allegory was embedded in masculinist discourses and Victorian binaries, gravitated to new ways of representing their sex in public decorations” (pg. 45). Corn further argues, “The birth of officially sanctioned woman’s buildings at American international fairs was tightly embedded in the debates that raged around women’s issues and gender equality in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Emblematic of the waves of American women seeking a broad range of reforms benefitting their sex, such buildings were typically proposed, organized, and administered by middle- and upper-class white women” (pg. 65). Further, “The Woman’s Building of 1893 was one of the places where women of different political persuasions learned to work side by side, an important step along the arduous path the universal suffrage” (pg. 70). Corn continues, “If women were going to have a pictorial history that featured them, it would have to be invented. The women decorators would have to take the lead stories of the Fair – Progress, Evolution, Modern Civilization – and change their perspective from male to female, telling ‘her-story’ rather than ‘his-story’” (pg. 97). As an example, Corn writes, “Removing modernity from the center of women’s lives was one way in which post-Victorian artists collectively revised the earlier generation’s priorities and demonstrated a widespread desire to redefine woman’s capabilities and enlarge her sphere of activity” (pg. 99).
Of the artists, Corn writes, “These artists created American girls who did not just dream of a better future but performed new ways of being female. By giving modern young women an inner self but also desires and ambitions, these muralists participated in the formation of a new female identity. They helped formulate the modern ‘American girl,’ as she was called at the time, a young woman enjoying a sustained period of growth between childhood and marriage” (pg. 122). Further, “Artists opted to picture woman’s work throughout history and to construct their story as a single-sex trajectory from past enslavement to present enlightenment. They may have painted in different styles, but they told the same story. The consistency of the historical narrative women envisioned for themselves in 1893 attests to its wide currency in American culture at large” (pg. 149). The artists “wanted to expand the meanings of ‘feminine’ and to make it embrace the clubwoman, artist, and writer, not just the daughter, wife, and mother. They wanted their sex to have more options without having to give up their feminine refinement and sophistication” (pg. 170). Corn concludes, “Progress cycles helped women see beyond the biological body that was understood in the wider culture to script their destiny” (pg. 188). ( )