Women and Gender at World Fairs and International Exhibitions: A Brief Overview

World fairs and international expositions have been crucial sites for the conveyance of ideas about gender and women to global audiences. Pre-dating the theme parks and mass attractions of the post-World War II era, world fairs held in the nineteenth century in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America occasioned the first global gatherings of mass numbers of people with many fairs attracting upwards of 10, 25 and, by the mid-twentieth century, as many as 50 million visitors to events that usually spanned five or six months. Apart from the communication technologies that would eventually permit masses of people to “virtually” gather together – and often presaging if not introducing these same technologies – world fairs helped produce a globalized mass public and permitted regional publics to form within nation-states. In recognition of the vast potential of world fairs to shape public opinion, governments as well as every variety of community organization attempted to exert control over the representation of themselves and their constituents at these events. Invariably the results of their efforts comprised elaborate displays of organizing and power brokering, generated innovative public relations campaigns, and honed new forms of propagandistic strategizing.

Given that world fairs and expositions represent the largest and most important international mass events of the modern era, the value of the records of these events to historians and serious students of modernity is incalculable. At world fairs and international expositions, ideological hot-button topics such as the capacities of the “savage” and the nature of human progress often received foregrounding – in explicitly racialist and nationalist terms. Demonstrations and exhibits charting the historical trajectory of human civilization set alongside visions of what lay in store for human society in the future inevitably comprised central concerns of exposition organizers. Cutting across these common motifs were questions and debates regarding gender relations, the composition and significance of sex difference, and the inherent nature and proper role of women in society. Manifestations of the “woman question” in the late nineteenth century, “new womanhood” emergent at the turn of the century, and “emancipated womanhood” in the early decades of the twentieth century, as articulated in exhibits, art, and publicity, served as lightning rods and gave physical form to what was most at stake at all world fairs and expositions: the nature of modernity itself.

World fairs have been powerful proselytizers of gender ideology and, at key moments, important venues for women’s collective and individualist self-promotion. In some fairs at noteworthy moments, ideas and impressions regarding women’s rights, women’s work, and women’s roles in modern society were explicitly promoted by women organizers and formed controversial points of public contention. But even apart from explicit feminist interventions, ideas about women and gender tacitly embedded within exposition design produced and promoted specific gender ideologies – often tied to nationalist agendas. Both implicit and explicit, ideas about women’s role in the family and the public sphere, about their rights as citizens, and their often indistinct relationship to the nation state, were a critical component of exposition messaging. Gender often served as the lens through which world fairs annunciated and promoted the national, ethnic, and racial identities that formed the centripetal portraits of modernity that exposition organizers promulgated. Making women’s roles and representation at fairs a potent symbol of modernity as national achievement, women – as organizers, performers, and visitors – were often the focus of public attention at expositions held during the “golden age” of this phenomenon, 1850-1965.