ABSTRACT
This essay considers the transnational qualities of woman-centered organizing as expressed in several important world’s fairs held in North America and as articulated in international exhibitions held in Europe during a period that saw the rise of women’s organized activism across national borders and during the heart of what is often referred to as the “golden” era of exhibitions (1851–1964). Despite their almost wholesale intentional exclusion from exhibition administrations, women seeking to collaborate across national borders seized the unprecedented opportunities that these events represented as best they could—sometimes carving out space and messaging within expositions, sometimes staging protests and counter-exhibits, and, most rarely of all, organizing exhibitions independently from men. How these mass events brought to the fore a specifically feminist transnational consciousness that both participated in and resisted masculinist as well as colonialist brands of internationalism, has rarely been acknowledged. This essay seeks to demonstrate how central the staging of a world’s fair and international exhibition were to the rise of transnational feminism, while at the same time observing the limits and compromises that the unrelenting nationalist format of world’s fairs and exhibitions imposed on the sort of feminism that generally was ventilated within these venues. As a point of comparison, the final section of this essay offers a glimpse of an imagined, and highly idealized, transnational community of women as workers that was presented at an autonomous and uniquely woman-centered set of world’s fairs held in Chicago in the 1920s.
