Feminist Practices: Signs on the Syllabus

Contents

Feminist Practicies: A Signs on the Syllabus Digital Course Reader

Mary Hawkesworth

Locating Knowledge in Time and Space

By Invitation Only: The American Library Association and the Woman’s Building Library of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

Wayne A. Wiegand and Sarah Wadsworth

Which Women? Which Practices? Challenging the Scope of Feminism

Recognition on the Surface of Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody

Shilyh Warren

Women’s Labor and the Politics of Race, Class, and Ethnicity

Preferences and Prejudices: Employers’ Views on Domestic Workers in the Republic of Yemen

Marina de Regt

Do Working Mothers Oppress Other Women? The Swedish Maid Debate and the Welfare State Politics of Gender Equality

John R. Bowman and Alyson M. Cole

Hungering for Power: Borders and Contradictions in Indian Tea Plantation Women’s Organizing

Piya Chatterjee

Interventions from the Philippines

Josefa (Gigi) Francisco and Gina dela Cruz

Women’s Labor Activism in Indonesia

Michele Ford

Women’s Labor Activism in China

Tong Xin

The Women’s Movement within Trade Unions in Germany

Masako Yuki

Organizing Immigrant Women in America’s Sweatshops: Lessons from the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center

Richard Sullivan and Kimi Lee

Housework, Feminism, and Labor Activism: Lessons from Domestic Workers in New York

Monisha Das Gupta

Commercializing Women’s Sexuality and Reproduction

Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance

Sheila Jeffreys

Eggs as Capital: Human Egg Procurement in the Fertility Industry and the Stem Cell Research Enterprise

Lisa C. Ikemoto

Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker

Amrita Pande

Love and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century

Arranging Love: Interrogating the Vantage Point in Cross-Border Feminism

Meena Khandelwal

Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan

Pei-Chia Lan

Unholy Matrimony? Feminism, Orientalism, and the Possibility of Double Critique

Juliet A. Williams

The State and the Friendships of the Nation: The Case of Nonconjugal Relationships in the United States and Canada

Lois Harder

Producing Homonormativity in Neoliberal South Africa: Recognition, Redistribution, and the Equality Project

Natalie Oswin

Violence Against Women

(Extra)Ordinary Violence: National Literatures, Diasporic Aesthetics, and the Politics of Gender in South Asian Partition Fiction

Rosemary Marangoly George

Negotiating (In)Security: Agency, Resistance, and Resourcefulness among Girls Formerly Associated with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front

Myriam Denov and Christine Gervais

Convergence of Civil War and the Religious Right: Reimagining Somali Women

Cawo Mohamed Abdi

Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border

Melissa Wright

Varieties of Feminist Activism

Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues

Christine M. Cooper

Scripting the Body: Pharmaceuticals and the (Re)Making of Menstruation

Laura Mamo and Jennifer Ruth Fosket

Twelve Miles: Boundaries of the New Art/Activism

Carrie Lambert Beatty

(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention

Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir

Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign

Josée Johnston and Judith Taylor

Discordant Connections: Discourses on Gender and Grassroots Activism in Two Forest Communities in India and Sweden

Seema Arora-Jonsson

Women’s Leadership and Governance

Silvia Tlaseca and the Kaolin Mushroom Workers Union: Women’s Leadership in the Mexican Diaspora

Victor Garcia

Challenges to Women’s Political Representation in Europe

Monique Leyenaar

Political Women’s Leadership in Sweden: Developments and Challenges

Gunnel Gustafsson and Kerstin Kolam

Lessons on Women’s Political Leadership from Bangladesh

Najma Chowdhury

Women’s Leadership in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges

Truong Thi Thuy Hang

Obstacles for Women in Leadership Positions: The Case of South Africa

Amanda Gouws

Women’s Politics and Leadership in Australia and New Zealand

Marian Simms

New Transnational Opportunities and Challenges for Women’s Leadership: The Consejo Consultivo del Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (CC-IME)

Laura Gonzalez and Jane Bayes

Gender Quotas, the Politics of Presence, and the Feminist Project: What Does the Indian Experience Tell Us?

Neema Kudva and Kajri Misra

Feminist Practices: A Signs on the Syllabus Digital Course Reader

Mary Hawkesworth

Rutgers University

Introduction

Feminism has experienced unprecedented growth over the past half century. As Sonia Alvarez has noted (1998, 4), the sites where women who declare themselves feminists act or may act have multiplied. It is no longer only in the streets, in autonomous or consciousness-raising groups, in workshops for popular education, etc. Although feminists continue to be in those spaces today, they are also in a wide range of other cultural, social, and political arenas: the corridors of the UN, the academy, state institutions, media, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], among others. Within the official institutions of state, feminist projects are ongoing through gender mainstreaming and the creation of national machinery for women, such as ministries for women, women’s bureaus, and gender-equality commissions. The feminist arm of the United Nations, UN Women, is working with indigenous women’s organizations on all continents to safeguard women’s lives and livelihoods, to secure their economic, political, and civil rights. Several states, such as Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, have included gender-equity efforts among their major foreign-policy initiatives. Femocrats work within public agencies to structure policy initiatives that address women’s needs, concerns, and interests, however contested these concepts may be. In the aftermath of four UN-sponsored world conferences on women, 187 of the 193 nations in the world have ratified CEDAW, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and women’s rights activists in all those nations are working to pressure their governments to change constitutions, laws, and customary practices in accordance with CEDAW provisions. Feminist activists work locally and through UN monitoring processes to press for full implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals.

Feminist NGOs continue to proliferate, creating a vibrant feminist civil society. Tens of thousands of organizations around the globe created by women and for women seek to develop women’s political agendas, conduct gender audits and gender-impact analyses of government policies, build progressive coalitions among women, deepen the meaning of democracy and democratization, deliver much-needed services to women, and pressure public and private sectors to include more women and respond better to women’s concerns. The substantive scope of such feminist work is vast, including struggles around subsistence; the politics of food, fuel, and firewood; women’s health and reproductive freedom; education for women and girls; employment opportunity, equal pay, safe working conditions, and protection against sexual harassment; rape and domestic violence; sexual trafficking; women’s rights as human rights; militarization; peacemaking; environmentalism; sustainable development; democratization; welfare rights; AIDS; parity in public office; women’s e-news; feminist journals and presses; and curriculum revision, feminist pedagogy, and feminist scholarship.

Despite this vibrant presence within and across nations, feminism is routinely maligned or misunderstood. This digital course reader draws upon recent articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to explore the nature of feminist practices in the twenty-first century and the range of issues they address. Organized thematically to examine gendered labor, the commercialization of women’s bodies, and comparative perspectives on love and marriage, violence against women, issue-based activism, and challenges to women’s leadership, the collection captures the complexity of a global movement that emerges in the context of local struggles over diverse modes of injustice.

As the readings in this collection make clear, feminism takes many different forms. To capture this diversity, feminist activists and scholars began referring to feminisms in the late 1980s to indicate that feminism was not the sole preserve of any one group and to signify the multiplicity of ways in which those who share a feminist critique may come together to address issues (Miller 1999, 225). As a strategic term introduced to resist unwarranted homogenization and generalization, the term feminisms calls attention to the complex array of ideological differences, variations in national and regional policy priorities, and tactical interventions characteristic of feminist practices in the twenty-first century.

Thinking about feminisms as a set of practices situates the issues addressed by the essays in this collection in a much older tradition. Practices aim at particular goods (MacIntyre 1981). The goods feminists seek and the activities they adopt to achieve those goods emerge in concrete historical circumstances. Feminist historians have traced vibrant practices of critique, now associated with feminisms, to the fourteenth century. As a set of political convictions that challenge male supremacy, forge ties among women, advocate political mobilization and policies to redress gender-based injustices, foster a vision for social change, and build alliances to transform social relations, feminism is a long and rich tradition. Yet, like any form of human action, feminist practices are ongoing and incomplete. They are often developed through trial and error. And they are reversible: advances made in one generation or in one location can be lost.

Whether applied to the field of medicine, law, music, dance, sport, or feminism, the idea of practicing suggests that certain skills and capacities can be developed only by participating in the practice itself. Those who choose to engage in the practice submit themselves to the rules governing the activity and the standards of excellence unique to it. By voluntarily adopting the norms that regulate the practice, participants cultivate pleasures and accomplishments unique to the activity while also entering into relationships with other practitioners in the field. When situated in the context of practicing feminisms, the essays in this collection invite students to imagine themselves as participants in campaigns to eliminate women’s economic, political, and social subordination, to challenge sexed and raced hierarchies of power, and to redress harms associated with heteronormativity. Feminist scholarship itself is a form of feminist practice that encourages readers to enact relations of equality in their everyday lives and to cultivate their capacities to perceive and analyze injustice.

The essays in the collection conceive feminist practices as political claims put forward in concrete settings and posing specific political demands for change: calls to redress and reconfigure the sexual balance of power in virtually every area of human life (Offen 2000, xv), and they invite students to think creatively about short-term tactics and long-term strategies for social transformation. Calling attention to power relations among women, as well as those between men and women, the essays raise important issues about structures of domination and subordination grounded in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality (Crenshaw 1989, 1997). The essays explore the global stakes in claiming feminism, probing the differences between those who embrace feminism and those who do not. They examine the inequities and challenges facing women and men, transgender and cisgender, in the contemporary world.

Course Description

The 2011 Slutwalks in major cities around the world, the creation of a thrift shop in the poorest neighborhood in Hong Kong, activism against biopiracy, the rural reconstruction movement, the slow food movement, the creation of gender quotas for public office in more than one hundred nations, a demand for inclusion at the World Social Forum, the prison-abolition movement, the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence Campaign, Riot Grrrls, the creation of women’s police stations in Brazil, Code Pink, Women in Black, Take Back the Night rallies, the mobilization to preserve Douglass College (the women’s college at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey), transnational campaigns against femicide in Central America, the global campaign for sexual democracy, Sister Namibia’s campaign against political homophobia, the three-year GEAR (Gender Equality Architecture Reform) campaign to establish UN Women, V-Day performances of The Vagina Monologues, DIY zines, the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice at the International Criminal Court—all are examples of recent and continuing feminist practices. What do these practices have in common? What exactly makes them feminist? What is their relation to Women’s and Gender Studies or to knowledge production more generally? This course is designed to explore such questions.

Feminism is a vibrant tradition that has contributed to intellectual ferment, cultural enrichment, and social transformation in all regions of the world for at least five centuries. Feminism is also a highly contested term—meaning very different things to those who caricature and repudiate it and to those who embrace the label. Some define feminism as a network of practices designed to eliminate women’s economic, political, and social subordination. But many men and women endorse those goals while rejecting the feminist label. How do women and men who identify as feminist differ from those who do not? What is at stake in claiming the feminist label?

Feminist practices involve social change projects inside and beyond the academy. Whether within the university or in larger national and global contexts, feminist projects entail challenging established relations of power (critique), envisioning alternative possibilities (theory), and activism to change social relations. Women’s and Gender Studies is often called the academic arm of feminism for it challenges what is believed to be known about women, men, and gender nonconformers, demonstrating that established knowledge is often shaped by research that takes men’s lives as the unquestioned standard, omitting or distorting women’s and transgender experiences. As an interdisciplinary field, Women’s and Gender Studies seeks to correct distortions created when women are omitted from the study of the world. Taking diverse forms of feminist practice as its focal point, the course investigates how to study the complexity of women’s and men’s lives in ways that take race, gender-power, ethnicity, class, and nationality seriously. The course will also show how such feminist knowledge production challenges long-established beliefs about the world.

Learning Goals

This course strives to enable students to develop their talents in oral and written communication and in critical analysis of words and the world. Toward that end, student presentations in class and written assignments are designed to achieve the following learning goals:

Course Requirements

The quality of any course is a direct result of the level of preparation and degree of participation of class members. In this course, each student will be expected to:

Writing Assignments

The writing assignments are designed to assist students in developing their analytical and critical skills. Toward that end, students will draw upon readings from the course and independent research to analyze particular feminist practices. The topic for the first assignment focuses on gendered labor and the commercialization of women’s sexuality and reproductive capabilities. Students may choose the topics for their second and third papers from the following course themes: love and marriage in the twenty-first century; violence against women; varieties of feminist activism; or women’s leadership and governance.

Assignment 1: The first topic explored in detail in this course involves women’s labor in different regions of the world and the commercialization of women’s bodies. Drawing upon course readings and at least three additional scholarly sources (book chapters or articles in academic journals), each student should write a paper that addresses the following questions: How is labor in the contemporary world raced and gendered? (Be sure to give specific examples.) Are there dimensions of labor exploitation unique to women? (Again, be sure to give specific examples.) What feminist practices have been developed to address gendered divisions of labor and the exploitation of women’s bodies? What obstacles have they encountered? What outcomes have they produced? The paper should be 5–8 typed, double-spaced pages.

Assignments 2 and 3: The second and third paper assignments are similar to the first, but each student is free to pick themes from the course on which to write. The options include love and marriage, violence against women, feminist activism, or women’s leadership. We will talk in class about how to frame questions to structure your papers. Again, the task is to use course readings as well as at least three additional scholarly sources to help you to analyze the issue. Each paper should be 5–8 typed, double-spaced pages. The deadline for each of these writing assignments coincides with the day the class discusses the topic. Students will share their research findings with the class. Once each student has decided on the topics for papers 2 and 3, we will develop a class schedule of presentations.

Course Calendar

Feminist Knowledge Practices

Class 1: The World According to Women

Marilyn Frye (1992, 71) once suggested that the project of feminist inquiry is to write a new encyclopedia—its title, The World, According to Women. Feminist inquiry seeks to develop an account of the world that places women’s lives, experiences, and perspectives at the center of analysis and that, in so doing, corrects the distorted, biased, and erroneous accounts advanced in mainstream scholarship. Feminist knowledge production investigates dimensions of existence often overlooked in traditional accounts. Feminist convictions attune scholars to power dynamics that structure women’s lives. By making power dynamics visible, probing silences, absences, and distortions in dominant paradigms, feminist inquiry challenges established explanatory accounts and identifies new questions for research. As Alison Wylie (2003, 38) has noted: It is the political commitment that feminists bring to diverse fields that motivates them to focus attention on lines of evidence others have not sought out or thought important; to discern patterns others have ignored; to question androcentric or sexist framework assumptions that have gone unnoticed or unchallenged; and sometimes to significantly reframe the research agenda of their discipline in light of different questions or an expanded repertoire of explanatory hypotheses.

Feminist approaches to knowledge production help explain how multiple people can look at the same things but perceive them differently. Feminist scholars advance cogent accounts of the politics of knowledge, explaining how facts can be contentious and why supposedly neutral accounts of political life are seldom what they seem (Hawkesworth 2006). Tacit assumptions about the nature of men and women, about race, class, sex, gender, and sexuality, about the scope of legitimate state action, and about the possibilities for social change shape perceptions of the facts. To investigate how processes of gendering, racialization, and heterosexualization are central to knowledge production, it is important to ask multiple questions about whose experience informs knowledge claims, what theories shape that experience, and what languages and cultures mediate those theories. A comparative approach is particularly helpful in unearthing tacit assumptions, particularly those that posit Western modernity as inherently superior to other cultures, which are conceived as traditional, backward, or developing. By comparing feminist issues and activism across multiple cultures, it becomes possible to see the partiality of our own views and the limitations of our own approaches to particular questions. The essays in the following units offer rich comparisons that illuminate problematic assumptions that inform many popular ideas.

Much of what circulates as knowledge about women suffers from excessive reductionism, purporting to deduce facts about women from assumptions about reproductive capabilities. Claims about women also suffer from overgeneralization—studies of a small sample of women are generalized to all women without paying any attention to the vast differences that characterize women’s lives. To avoid the twin pitfalls of reductionism and overgeneralization, Marilyn Frye (1992, 66) recommends novel acts of attention to unbury the data of women’s lives. Her strategy for knowledge production requires examination of systematic data about women to discover patterns that reveal more than statistical frequencies even though they fall short of universal generalizations. Pattern recognition generates new interpretive possibilities precisely because it links similarities to differences. Patterns need not be either uniform or identical to be revealing. By exploring the limits of a pattern, investigating where it holds and where it fails, one learns to grapple with difference. Careful attention to context and specificity, then, can facilitate understanding of the scope of a pattern and its limits while also illuminating crucial points at which there is change. In this way, feminist inquiry can contribute to social transformation, identifying both issues that need to be addressed and strategies helpful to eliminate inequities.

Locating Knowledge in Time and Space

To begin to understand how knowledge has been skewed toward the experiences of people of a particular race, class, ethnicity, and nationality, it is useful to consider the efforts of the Board of Lady Managers of the Women’s Pavilion at the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition. The Board of Lady Managers sought to bring together the great scientific, literary, and imaginative works of women of all nations of the world. By situating this endeavor in the context of American exceptionalism, Wayne Wiegand and Sarah Wadsworth’s article demonstrates how a discourse about progress and innovation contributed to a worldview that validated particular ideals of affluent white Western womanhood while positioning the majority of the world’s women, who—then as now—reside in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as primitive, backward, and in need of civilizing. The essay illuminates the racial order that undergirds particular notions of femininity and shows how well-intentioned efforts to forge global solidarity among women simultaneously marginalize and distort the experiences of the majority of the world’s women.

Class 2: Wayne A. Wiegand and Sarah Wadsworth, By Invitation Only: The American Library Association and the Woman’s Building Library of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, Signs 35, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 699–722.

Which Women? Which Practices? Challenging the Scope of Feminism

In contrast to the notion that racial and gender subordination are natural, feminists conceptualize persistent gender and racial asymmetry as relations of power, intricate deployments of social forces to produce women and men as members of particular races, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities. Racialization and gendering create forms of inequality written on the body, shaping how individuals understand themselves and what they can make of themselves. Madeline Anderson’s 1969 documentary film I Am Somebody provides an excellent means to begin examining racing-gendering—the political process through which particular identities are sculpted in ways that simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate and naturalize those social relations of domination.

The film tells the story of four hundred African American hospital workers—all but twelve of whom were women—who went on strike in 1969 after several of their colleagues were fired for trying to organize a union. The film provides a graphic depiction of a racial order in the United States, established by law and upheld by public officials from the governor of the state of South Carolina to state and local police officers and National Guard troops called in to preserve that order. In showing the courage of black women hospital workers who claim the right to march on public streets, to articulate their labor grievances, and to exercise the rights guaranteed to citizens in the US Constitution, the film illuminates connections between feminism, union activism, and civil rights mobilizations. In her insightful analysis of the film, Shilyh Warren demonstrates the complex issues at stake: equal working conditions and pay for black and white workers, the right to unionize, the right to occupy public space, equal treatment by the state, the abolition of racial segregation in US cities, and the recognition of the fundamental humanity of African Americans.

Class 3: In-class film: Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody

Shilyh Warren, "Recognition on the Surface of Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody," Signs 38, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 353–78.

Women’s Labor and the Politics of Race, Class, and Ethnicity

In her plenary address to the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, Noeleen Heyzer, then the director of UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, condemned the injustice encapsulated in the following statistic: women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours but earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-tenth of the world’s property. The striking disparity between hours worked and remuneration received reflects various factors. Two-thirds of the work women do is unwaged (compared to one-quarter of men’s work). Occupational segregation by sex concentrates women in the lowest-waged and least-secure positions. Slightly more than 20 percent of all economically active women are employed in the industrial sector, while 75 percent are employed in the far less well paid service sector. Women are overrepresented in the subsistence and informal (unstructured and unregulated) sectors of the economy and underrepresented in the formal sector, where pay levels are higher and fringe benefits may be provided. Women also constitute three-quarters of the part-time labor force, working for very low pay without any job security and little hope of upward mobility. Women continue to suffer systemic pay discrimination. Even in nations with equal pay legislation on the books, women earn less than men. In Canada, for example, women earn on average 73 percent of the average white male wage compared to 74 percent in the United States; women earn 77 percent of men’s wages in China and Southern Africa; 82 percent in Argentina and Brazil; 84 percent in Norway and Sweden; 86 percent in Australia and New Zealand; and 98 percent in Costa Rica. Women also comprise the majority of those enmeshed in coerced labor. Of the 12 million people worldwide involved in forced labor—from sweatshop workers to sex slaves—women and girls constitute 98 percent of those in forced sexual exploitation and 56 percent of those in forced industrial labor (Seager 2009, 56, 63–66).

Across much of the global South, women are responsible for subsistence, producing the food that sustains the household. Because this form of subsistence production is often subsumed under the rubric of housework, it is often omitted from official counts of farm labor, raising questions about the reliability of statistics about gendered divisions of labor in agriculture. In official statistics, women comprise 40 percent of the agricultural labor force worldwide; 67 percent in developing countries; and 80 percent in sub-Saharan Africa (Seager 2009, 68).

When women’s lives are placed at the center of analysis, many long-established policy prescriptions are called into question. For example, attention to subsistence, informal, and care economies, where women’s labor tends to be concentrated, reveals the defects of studies that examine only the formal sector of the economy—the sector regulated by the state. When this larger economic framework is taken into account, the mistaken notion that women do not work is quickly dispelled. Not only do women work, but they tend to do double and triple shifts—combining waged work in the informal sector with unwaged work in the home and untold hours of volunteer labor to build and sustain communities. When the full extent of women’s daily labor is taken into account, it becomes possible to see that maxims of modernization theory are thoroughly wrongheaded. The facile notion that the path to women’s emancipation lies in women’s incorporation into the formal economy is not only mistaken, but cruel.

The essays in this unit investigate the kinds of labor that women perform in various regions of the world, how racing-gendering creates hierarchies among women workers, the class dimensions of global commodity chains and the transnational care economy, and multiple forms of women’s activism to address inequities in the sexual division of labor as well as in working conditions and remuneration.

Class 4: Marina de Regt, Preferences and Prejudices: Employers’ Views on Domestic Workers in the Republic of Yemen, Signs 34, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 559–81.

Class 5: John R. Bowman and Alyson M. Cole, Do Working Mothers Oppress Other Women? The Swedish ‘Maid Debate’ and the Welfare State Politics of Gender Equality, Signs 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 157–84.

Class 6: Comparative Perspectives Symposium on Women’s Labor Activism, Signs 33, no. 3 (Spring 2008): Piya Chatterjee, Hungering for Power: Borders and Contradictions in Indian Tea Plantation Women’s Organizing, pp. 497–505; Josefa (Gigi) Francisco and Gina dela Cruz, Interventions from the Philippines, pp. 505–10; Michele Ford, Women’s Labor Activism in Indonesia, pp. 510–15; Tong Xin, Women’s Labor Activism in China, pp. 515–18; Masako Yuki, The Women’s Movement within Trade Unions in Germany, pp. 519–27; Richard Sullivan and Kimi Lee, Organizing Immigrant Women in America’s Sweatshops: Lessons from the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center, pp 527–32; Monisha Das Gupta, Housework, Feminism, and Labor Activism: Lessons from Domestic Workers in New York, pp. 532–37.

Commercializing Women’s Sexuality and Reproduction

Quite apart from working conditions and pay inequities in agricultural, industrial, and service sectors, women in the twenty-first century continue to be commodified—reduced to objects for sale. Essays in this section investigate contemporary commercialization of women’s bodies through sex work, assisted reproductive technology, human embryonic stem cell research, and surrogacy contracts. Individually and collectively, the articles raise a number of probing questions: How does the instrumentalization of women’s bodies affect our understanding of work and of gender? Does instrumentalizing women preclude the possibility that work should be a means to cultivate one’s physical and mental abilities? Can sex work serve as a means of empowerment? How does selling one’s body differ from selling one’s labor or a service? How are racial and sexual hierarchies being sustained or transformed by reproductive technologies? Can equal citizenship coexist with the commercialization of women’s bodies?

Class 7: Sheila Jeffreys, Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 151–73.

Class 8: Lisa C. Ikemoto, Eggs as Capital: Human Egg Procurement in the Fertility Industry and the Stem Cell Research Enterprise, Signs 34, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 763–81.

Class 9: Amrita Pande, Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker, Signs 35, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 969–92.

* Writing Assignment 1 due.

Love and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century

The Atlas of Women in the World reports that marriage and motherhood remain the norm for women and men, although divorce is common and family size continues to fall. In most parts of the world, 90 percent of adults marry at least once, although in the Caribbean nations, Greenland, Sweden, and the island communities of Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, New Caledonia, and the Cook Islands, the marriage rate falls below 80 percent (Seager 2009, 24–25). Same-sex marriage is legally recognized in eleven nations, and an additional twenty countries allow civil unions and registered partnerships for same-sex couples. Although divorce remains illegal in Malta and the Philippines, it is common practice in many nations. In Russia, for example, 65 percent of marriages end in divorce; in the United States, 49 percent do. Rising divorce rates, increasing numbers of women who choose not to marry, male migration for work, and elderly women who live alone have contributed to significant increases in women-headed households worldwide. In more than one-third of the nations of the world, women head 25 percent or more of the households (Seager 2009, 22–23). Marriage migration is a growing phenomenon in the contemporary world, particularly in Southeast Asia, where skewed gender ratios have contributed to a shortage of brides.

Essays in this unit examine the changing nature of marriage. They explore the contours of an institution that is thoroughly regulated by the state yet is perceived as a private matter, an institution that is discussed as an intimate relation even as it structures the economic prospects of individuals and communities. What exactly is conjugality? What is the relation between love, marriage, sexuality, and reproduction? If marriage is construed as an economic relation, how does it differ from transactional sex? Why are states so involved in the regulation of marriage? Does the state have compelling reasons to regulate the terms and conditions of intimacy? Has neoliberalism changed perceptions of the state’s legitimate interest in regulating conjugal and nonconjugal relationships? How does heteronormativity entrench inequities even in nations that permit same-sex marriage?

Class 10: Meena Khandelwal, Arranging Love: Interrogating the Vantage Point in Cross-Border Feminism, Signs 34, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 583–609.

Class 11: Pei-Chia Lan, Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan, Signs 33, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 833–62.

Class 12: Juliet A. Williams, Unholy Matrimony? Feminism, Orientalism, and the Possibility of Double Critique, Signs 34, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 611–32.

Class 13: Lois Harder, The State and the Friendships of the Nation: The Case of Nonconjugal Relationships in the United States and Canada, Signs 34, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 633–58.

Class 14: Natalie Oswin, Producing Homonormativity in Neoliberal South Africa: Recognition, Redistribution, and the Equality Project, Signs 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 649–69.

Violence against Women

Rape—sexual intercourse without consent—is the form of violence most frequently enacted against women. Although rape as a weapon in war has garnered some international attention in the past two decades, acquaintance rape and sexual violation by a friend, an intimate partner, or even a spouse is seldom considered a matter of political concern. Exercised as a privilege of power, the numbers of sexual assaults annually are staggering: 28 percent of the women in India, 25 percent of the women in Zimbabwe, and 23 percent of the women in Great Britain, for example, report that they have been subjected to sexual assault by an intimate male partner; 32 percent of the women in Costa Rica, 26 percent of the women in Nicaragua, and 21 percent of the women in the United States report having been sexually abused as a child (Seager 2009, 58).

In 1971, Barbara Mehrhof and Pamela Kearan, founding members of the radical feminist collective Redstockings, produced a small tract that characterized rape as a mode of terrorism. Construing coerced heterosexual intercourse as a political relation that structures male superiority and female inferiority, Rape: An Act of Terror suggested that rape plays a particular role in normalizing relations of domination. Rape not only positions woman qua woman outside the protection of the law, but it also produces a form of demoralization and powerlessness that perpetuates male domination (Mehrhof and Kearan 1973, 229).

For some women, rape is prelude to murder. Activists in Mexico and Central America have adopted the term femicide to refer to the mass murder of women during peacetime. Claims concerning femicide began to circulate transnationally in 1993 in response to the rapes, mutilations, and murders of nearly four hundred young Mexican women in the city of Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas (Monárrez Fragoso 2002). The Guatamala Human Rights Commission began documenting femicide in 2001 and has counted 4,654 femicides between 2001 and 2009, the highest number in Central America. Increasing numbers of women are also being killed in Honduras, San Salvador, and Costa Rica, sometimes surpassing three hundred each year (Prieto-Carrón, Thomson, and Macdonald 2007).

Like the radical feminist theorization of rape, femicide is conceived "not simply as the murder of females but rather as the killing of females by males because they are female. It is a form of terrorism that functions to define gender lines, enact and bolster male dominance, and render women chronically and profoundly unsafe" (Guatemala Human Rights Commission 2010). Femicide activists also point out that various states have been unwilling or unable to bring murderers to justice.

The articles in this section compare violence against women in the context of armed conflict with violence against women in peacetime. In the words of Rosemary Marangoly George, the essays examine extraordinary and ordinary violence and their relation to nationalism and gendered citizenship. Analyzing women’s role as agents of violence in wartime, as well as women’s experiences of violence in noncombat situations, the assigned readings raise questions about violence as a technique of governance, as well as necropolitics and the production of gendered subjectivities in Africa, South Asia, and North America.

Class 15: Rosemary Marangoly George, (Extra)Ordinary Violence: National Literatures, Diasporic Aesthetics, and the Politics of Gender in South Asian Partition Fiction, Signs 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 135–58.

Class 16: Myriam Denov and Christine Gervais, Negotiating (In)Security: Agency, Resistance, and Resourcefulness among Girls Formerly Associated with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front, Signs 32, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 885–910.

Class 17: Cawo Mohamed Abdi, Convergence of Civil War and the Religious Right: Reimagining Somali Women, Signs 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 183–207.

Class 18: Melissa Wright, Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border, Signs 36, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 707–31.

Varieties of Feminist Activism

Feminist activists in all regions of the world have found remarkably creative ways to contest their exclusion from the public sphere and the official institutions of state and to devise new political spaces for activism and advocacy. Women’s activism has not been restricted to any particular class, race, ethnic, religious, or national community. It has not been limited to particular political parties or narrow sets of issues and interests. On the contrary, in all regions of the globe, women have been engaged in collective mobilization across multiple scales (grassroots, municipal, regional, national, transnational, international, and virtual) to envision and create a different world order, a world more attuned to the possibilities for inclusive democratic practices and more equitable distributions of economic and political resources. They have experimented with consciousness raising, popular education, and information politics. They have organized encuentros, workshops, seminars, conferences, and media campaigns. They have used artistic performances, cultural production, symbolic politics, and public demonstrations. They have mobilized as individuals, social movements, private interest groups, party activists, NGOs, professional lobbyists, clandestine freedom fighters, and elected officials.

The essays in this unit explore feminist practices that expand our understanding of politics, ranging from the politics of raced-gendered embodiment to the politics of biomedicalization, contraception, and menstrual suppression. They consider how reproductive rights activism, like antiwar activism, has positioned some feminists as threats to national security. They investigate how gender hierarchies are reproduced even as feminist activists break new ground for women in the public sphere. They analyze how difficult it is to transform hegemonic beauty ideals even when those ideals incorporate impossible and unhealthy norms. They also consider how beliefs about equality can constrict the possibilities for women to mobilize as women for social change.

Class 19: Christine M. Cooper, "Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues," Signs 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 727–58.

Class 20: Laura Mamo and Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Scripting the Body: Pharmaceuticals and the (Re)Making of Menstruation, Signs 34, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 925–49.

Class 21: Carrie Lambert Beatty, Twelve Miles: Boundaries of the New Art/Activism, Signs 33, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 309–27.

Class 22: Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, (En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention, Signs 32, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 973–96.

Class 23: Josée Johnston and Judith Taylor, Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, Signs 33, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 941–66.

Class 24: Seema Arora-Jonsson, Discordant Connections: Discourses on Gender and Grassroots Activism in Two Forest Communities in India and Sweden, Signs 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 213–40.

Women’s Leadership and Governance

In 2013, women hold the highest offices in their nations, serving as president, prime minister, and chancellor in twenty-one nations. Women hold on average 19.1 percent of the seats in national assemblies across the globe. They hold 16 percent of the cabinet-level positions in their nations. Manifold differences distinguish women’s political experiences within and across these nations. Comparing these experiences can reveal surprising patterns in women’s political activities—patterns that dispel mistaken notions. Western nations, for example, often position themselves as world leaders in gender equality, yet the African nation Rwanda has the highest percentage of women (56 percent) serving in its national legislature, three times the global average of 19 percent. For decades Asia led the world in numbers of women serving in chief executive offices. Women have had greater success in winning executive office in Latin America than in any other region; nine of thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have elected women presidents or prime ministers (Htun and Piscopo 2010). By contrast, the United States, which prides itself on being a leader in women’s equality, trails behind ninety other nations in the percentage of women serving in elective offices. In substantive equality policies the United States also lags behind all the advanced democratic nations, and its foreign policy initiatives have been far from egalitarian. Indeed, during the first eight years of the twenty-first century, the United States formed an alliance with Catholic and Islamic fundamentalists in an attempt to reverse the United Nations gender-equality commitments, which had won global support at the 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing. Comparative analysis provides a critical context in which to examine the political worlds of women (Hawkesworth 2012).

The essays in this final unit examine women’s political leadership in different regions of the world and analyze various factors that deter women’s political activism and obstruct their political advancement. The essays also consider innovative strategies developed by women in specific regions to address these obstacles, which may have beneficial applications elsewhere.

Class 25: Victor Garcia, Silvia Tlaseca and the Kaolin Mushroom Workers Union: Women’s Leadership in the Mexican Diaspora, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 42–47; Monique Leyenaar, Challenges to Women’s Political Representation in Europe, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 1–8; Gunnel Gustafsson and Kerstin Kolam, Political Women’s Leadership in Sweden: Developments and Challenges, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 27–32.

Class 26: Najma Chowdhury, Lessons on Women’s Political Leadership from Bangladesh, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 8–15; Truong Thi Thuy Hang, Women’s Leadership in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 16–21; Amanda Gouws, Obstacles for Women in Leadership Positions: The Case of South Africa, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 21–27.

Class 27: Marian Simms, Women’s Politics and Leadership in Australia and New Zealand, Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 32–36; Laura Gonzalez and Jane Bayes, New Transnational Opportunities and Challenges for Women’s Leadership: The Consejo Consultivo del Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (CC-IME), Signs 34, no. 1(Autumn 2008): 37–42.

Class 28: Neema Kudva and Kajri Misra, Gender Quotas, the Politics of Presence, and the Feminist Project: What Does the Indian Experience Tell Us? Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 49–73.

Feminist Knowledge: Recapping the Issues

Class 29: Course review

References

Alvarez, Sonia. 1998. Feminismos latinamericanos: Reflexiones teóricas y perspectives comparativas. In Reflexiones teóricas y comparativas sobre los Feminismos en Chile y América Latina, ed. Marcela Rios, 4–22. Santiago: Notas del Conversatorio.

First citation in text

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–67.

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———. 1997. Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew. In Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, ed. Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto, 549–68. New York: New York University Press.

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Frye, Marilyn. 1992. The Possibility of Feminist Theory. In Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976–1992. Freedom, CA: Crossing.

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Guatemala Human Rights Commission. 2010. Fact Sheet: Femicide and Feminicide., Guatemala Human Rights Commission / USA, Washington, DC. http://www.ghrc-usa.org/Programs/ForWomensRighttoLive/factsheet_femicide.pdf.

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Hawkesworth, Mary. 2006. Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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———. 2012. Political Worlds of Women: Activism, Advocacy and Governance in the Twenty-First Century. Boulder, CO: Westview.

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Htun, Mala, and Jennifer Piscopo. 2010. Presence without Empowerment? Women in Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Paper prepared for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, Global Institute for Gender Research, Social Science Research Council, December.

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MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Mehrhof, Barbara, and Pamela Kearan. 1973. Rape: An Act of Terror. In Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, 228–33,. New York: Quadrangle / New York Times.

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Miller, Francesca. 1999. Feminisms and Transnationalism. In Feminisms and Internationalism, ed. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott, 225–36. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. 2002. Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001. Women on the Border. http://www.womenontheborder.org/sex_serial_english.pdf. Originally published as Femicidio sexual serial en Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001, Debate Femenista 25 (April 2002): 279–308.

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Offen, Karen. 2000. European Feminisms, 1700–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Prieto-Carrón, Marina, Marilyn Thomson, and Mandy Macdonald. 2007. No More Killings! Women Respond to Femicides in Central America. Gender and Development 15(1):25–40.

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Seager, Joni. 2009. The Atlas of Women in the World. 4th ed. London: Earthscan.

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Wylie, Alison. 2003. Why Standpoint Matters. In Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, ed. Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding, 26–48. New York: Routledge.

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© 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 3, 699–722

By Invitation Only: The American Library Association and the Woman’s Building Library of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

Wayne A. Wiegand

School of Library and Information Studies, Florida State University

Sarah Wadsworth

Department of English, Marquette University

By invitation only, at 9:30 a.m. on July 21, 1893, members of the American Library Association (ALA) gathered in the Woman’s Building in the White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for their seventh conference session of the exposition. As guests of the Board of Lady Managers (BLM), the group responsible for the design, construction, and exhibits of the marvelous building in which they were meeting, they sat in the middle of the rotunda on the building’s ground floor. Several members of the BLM mingled with their ALA guests. That the ALA selected Chicago for its 1893 conference was not surprising. During the previous two years the exposition’s World’s Fair Auxiliary had worked hard to convince hundreds of professional associations to choose the exposition as a site for their annual conferences. In fact, the ALA had committed to the exposition in 1891. Not until June 26, 1893, however, did ALA president Melvil Dewey accept an invitation from Virginia Meredith, chair of the BLM’s Committee of Awards, to hold at least one conference session in the Woman’s Building. I will try and make the women specially prominent on that day, he had promised, and think we can make it be a desirable feature.¹

What particularly interested the ALA members gathered in the Woman’s Building on July 21, 1893, was the library on the building’s second floor: a unique collection of printed materials authored, illustrated, edited, or translated by women from all over the world. Never before had such a collection been assembled. That morning the ALA met in the rotunda to view and commemorate this landmark library. Echoing the rhetoric of progress that saturated the World’s Columbian Exposition, Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), identified the library as an amazing collection of books written by women that demonstrated a history of women in letters. To Willard, the library revealed this history by showing what a thin long line it was during many centuries, and how it has rapidly broadened out in a magnificent way since education has opened the door to almost every department of science and art (Willard 1893, 467). Because the rotunda rose to the full height of the building and was capped with a skylight, many of those attending could glimpse the library’s entrance from where they sat.

The library upstairs, like the ALA members assembled in the rotunda, represented important components of the culture of print that had evolved and helped to shape history in the four centuries since Columbus landed in the New World. It was a cultural space that invited the exchange of social capital by millions of visitors to the World’s Fair. In fact, the room itself—sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and twenty feet high—had several functions. Organizers intended that it exhibit books authored by women since 1492, that it serve as a comfortable and aesthetically distinctive gathering place for visitors to the Woman’s Building, and that through a resident librarian it operate as a source of information about women. In addition, the ALA, from whose membership the librarians were drawn, hoped it would model the role women had embraced in pioneering the new professional field of librarianship. These functions were largely complementary; nevertheless, the convergence of the ALA and the BLM at the midpoint of the fair’s six-month run brings into focus competing visions of culture and progress that contended within the public space of the Woman’s Building and in the larger theater of the Columbian Exposition. These competing visions are nowhere more evident than in the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that informed the cultural projects of the Woman’s Building Library and the ALA.

The women responsible for the library’s creation were highly conscious of the unprecedented opportunity the Woman’s Building afforded to spotlight women’s contribution to fine and applied arts, education, family life, service, and other fields in which women had labored. Conscious that women’s work had long been undervalued, they were also highly attuned to the enormous advantages, as well as the potential disadvantages, of the venue. Although the question of whether or not women’s work should be integrated into exhibits throughout the exposition had been hotly contested, advocates of a special women’s exhibit hall had ultimately prevailed. Those who opposed a separate exhibit had argued that displaying women’s work in isolation would send the message that women were not equal to men and should be judged by a separate standard. Those who advocated for the separate exhibit had objected that if women’s work were incorporated into exhibits throughout the fair, it would be less visible and, most likely, unrecognizable as being produced by women. On a less pragmatic level, this debate reflected differing stances on the question of separate spheres. Some women were highly critical of pursuing a course that would emphasize woman’s nature as fundamentally distinct and separate from man’s. This view, they felt, helped justify the exclusion of women from full participation in the public sphere. Other women remained deeply committed to the ideology of True Womanhood. In the end the decision to erect a special building to house exhibits by and about women reflected a political compromise. While upholding the distinction between women and men, the exhibits and events in the Woman’s Building sought to extend the range of women’s domestic activities into the public arena. As this compromise reveals, both the physical space of the Woman’s Building and the planning and organizing that went into it served as a battleground on which conflicting ideas about women and womanhood vied.

Like the debate over separate or integrated exhibits, the interior design of the Woman’s Building Library reflected both a validation of the feminine values associated with separate-sphere ideology, which assigned women to the privacy of the home and barred them from participation in public life, and a critique of the limits of that ideology. In order to signal the resulting combination of values—femininity, domesticity, and benevolence, but also education, progress, and professionalism—the BLM had paid special attention to the aesthetics of the room. The committee responsible for the library’s design carefully devised a decor that recalled the reassuring solidity and exclusiveness of a well-appointed private library. In taking this approach, the committee departed from architectural and decorating imperatives of (mostly male) library leaders, who in the 1890s preferred to emphasize bureaucratic efficiency and utilitarian purpose in planning library spaces. But Candace Wheeler, the nationally known New York textile designer, artist, and interior decorator who designed the library, had very particular ideas about libraries that emphasized the connection between these traditionally masculine spaces and the feminine sphere of domesticity.

In her book Principles of Home Decoration Wheeler insisted that a home or private library is not only to hold books, but to make the family at home in a literary atmosphere (Wheeler 1903, 199). Thus, she concluded, the color scheme may, and should, be much warmer and stronger than that of a parlour pure and simple (200). And, Wheeler suggests, the aesthetics of the room should blend harmoniously with its natural surroundings, emphasizing the distinctiveness of its location and environment. Later reflecting on the Woman’s Building Library, she recalled her desire to integrate its decor with the panorama of Lake Michigan and its boundless horizon: After seeing the nobility of the room’s proportions, and the one great window which seemed to take in all the blue of the sky and the expanse of water which lay under it, she explained, I felt that it would be an insult to this dominant color to introduce anything in this sheltered space which would be at war with it (Wheeler 1918, 345). Wheeler stressed that both its purpose and place demanded the use of every appropriate means of beauty. Consequently, she chose modulations of blue and green for the color treatment of the room (345).²

The decorating of the library apparently achieved the desired effect—that of recreating the atmosphere of a lavish home library within the public space of the Woman’s Building in a manner that harmonized naturally with its physical setting. Maud Howe Elliott, daughter of Julia Ward Howe and editor of Art & Handicraft in the Woman’s Building, praised the domestic character of the interior design, noting that from a purely artistic standpoint the library is the most important feature of the building, after the Hall of Honor. . . . The room has a character and individuality that we rarely find save in the house of some esthetic lovers of books . . . there is no single apartment in the whole Fair where [the visitor] will find himself so pleasantly at home (Elliott 1894, 39). Equally impressed, Art Amateur declared it among the very best bits of interior decoration in the Fair and described it in terms that suggest an idealized feminine deportment: The whole effect of the room is reposeful, quiet and cheerful (Art Amateur 1893, 10). Lady Manager Ellen M. Henrotin pronounced the library the most beautiful room in the building (Henrotin 1893, 562). The overwhelmingly positive response attests to the success of Wheeler’s committee in using interior design to project the outward appearance and feminine values of the private, domestic sphere onto this very public space.

As intimated by Wheeler’s allusion to the nobility of the room’s proportions, the exhibits and the decor self-consciously cultivated a cultural elitism that was both Eurocentric and exclusionary. At either end of the library stood two large standards framed with wings, containing a collection of autographs and documents written by such noble women as Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Affixed to the ceiling, a large painting by Wheeler’s daughter, Dora Wheeler (later Dora Wheeler Keith), depicted allegorical figures framed by large oval medallions: enclosed within a border of Venetian scrollwork, the central oval featured mythical female figures representing realms of intellectual endeavor: science, literature, and imagination. Medallions in the corners, which were connected by paintings of drapery intertwined with lilies and streamers, framed the literary genres of history, romance, poetry, and drama in a similar allegorical guise. So as not to strain their necks, viewers could examine the images by peering into a mirror placed atop a large dark oak table in the center of the room, hand carved by the renowned Sypher & Company with sixteenth-century designs. Visitors could repose in similarly carved antique oak chairs and sofas upholstered in dark green leather by Associated Artists of New York, a firm Candace Wheeler had founded along with Louis Comfort Tiffany. Paneling of the same dark oak lined the walls above the bookcases, on top of which, at calculated intervals, perched specimens of hammered brass and pottery from Rookwood—one of the first companies in the United States to be owned and operated by a woman. On the walls above the bookcases hung portraits of many of the women whose works appeared in the collection; Wheeler also made sure that busts of notable women by notable women were decoratively used (Wheeler 1918, 346). All this contrasted sharply with other libraries recently erected across the country, almost all of which exhibited busts of famous men, whose names and literary quotations were often chiseled into building cornices and whose portraits frequently hung over library fireplaces.

In addition to evoking European stateliness and refinement, the decor of the Woman’s Building prominently displayed artwork created by American women. In doing so, the library implicitly placed the contributions of American women in the context of European traditions, set their work alongside those of the most admired European women, and distinguished Americans among all the nationalities represented as meriting heightened attention. While some of the items on display alluded to American racial and cultural diversity, these allusions were mediated or interpreted through Eurocentric perspectives. For example, among the many works of art stood a statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha, by African American and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, that Imogen Howard of New York (the lone African American representative among all the state BLM delegations) had obtained for the room. Over the fireplace, a specially commissioned reproduction of a Renaissance-era portrait of Pocahontas, wearing a lace ruff and holding a quill pen, drew the eye to this position of prominence. In one corner of the library a five-foot-high mahogany cabinet with glass sides and glass shelves showcased an early portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, copies of forty-two translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, copies of its two-volume first edition, the latest reprint by Houghton Mifflin, and a beautiful silver inkstand that Stowe had received from English supporters the year following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—ten inches in height, eighteen inches wide, and twenty-eight in length, a Connecticut official proudly noted—representing two slaves freed from their shackles (Weimann 1981, 363–64). A marble bust of Stowe gazed serenely from a granite pedestal nearby.³

Altogether I was satisfied, Wheeler concluded. I felt that the women of all America would not be sorry to be women in the face of all that women had done besides living and fulfilling their recognized duties (1918, 346). Most visitors seemed to agree. In late June a fairgoer from Canada reported to her local newspaper: A whole day devoted to this one room would repay one richly (Sana 1893, 3).⁴ Willard was effusive: Had the Board of Lady Managers accomplished nothing else than bringing these books together in this beautiful room, she exclaimed, it would have done a great deal (Willard 1893, 467). Most tellingly of the BLM’s success in highlighting American women writers and elevating their status, Lady Manager Rebecca A. Felton observed that the library’s very atmosphere became redolent with the greatness of American women in literature and fine art.⁵

With this atmosphere of artistic greatness rising above the tumult of the World’s Fair, the Woman’s Building and its library, like other sites in the White City, exemplify what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias, or other spaces—real, physical places that function like countersites . . . in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (Foucault 2004, 374). With their monumental collections of timeless cultural treasures and innovations contained within temporary structures erected specifically for the fair, many of these sites function as two distinct forms of heterotopia. On the one hand, they epitomize the museum-like heterotopia that seeks to enclose in one place a collection or archive that is outside of time; on the other hand, they partake of the festival-like heterotopia that is linked . . . to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect (Foucault 2004, 377).

As