2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This roundtable seeks to stimulate discussion about women in universal exhibitions, around the publication of a collective volume Exhibiting Women:  Reclaiming Women in the International and Universal Exhibitions.

From the outset women participated in universal exhibitions, although contemporaries more commonly depicted them as spectators or consumers, swooning before the marvels on display. Tracing the changing nature of women’s engagement in these exhibitions brings to light a little explored facet of women’s history that highlights the significance of transnational encounters in the forging of modern female subjectivities. Women’s claims for visibility within exhibitions emerged alongside the organization of both an American and European feminist movement. The first women’s pavilions signaled an awareness of how an international stage might further women’s national aspirations, beginning with the centennial celebration of American independence in 1876 in Philadelphia. Two years later French feminists organized the first International congress for the rights of women alongside the Parisian exhibition. With this congress, gender politics entered the arena. The much commented upon Woman’s Building at the Chicago World Fair (1893) represented a highpoint in women’s collective efforts to use the language of exhibitions to vaunt their contribution to the social and moral economy of their respective nations, an effort they would pursue in the years that followed. 

The roundtable offers the opportunity to pursue international and interdisciplinary conversations about how women were actors in the making of these modern spaces, contributing through their presence to the gendering of American and European modernities.