ABSTRACT
The congresses and exhibits held in connection with the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 offered women innumerable opportunities to contribute to this important showcase of French, international and Parisian culture, scientific achievement, industry and modernity. Historians have focused attention on the events women organized to highlight female achievement and activities, and on the importance for French and international feminism of the two international women’s congresses held at the 1900 Exhibition. But women’s larger roles in the Exhibition as organizers, publicists and participants in events that were not clearly marked “feminine” have received less scholarly attention. This chapter addresses this lacuna through the examples of French women Anna Lampériére (1854–?) and Jeanne Weill (a.k.a. Dick May, 1859–1925), each of whom played a central role in planning, publicizing and organizing a major international congress focused on the broad theme of what they termed “social education” at the 1900 Exhibition: Lampérière as Secretary General of the Congrès de l’éducation sociale (Social Education Congress) and Weill in the same role for the Congrès international de l’enseignement des sciences sociales (International Congress on Social Science Teaching). Comparing and contrasting the two events and the words and activities of the women as revealed in archival documents, correspondence and published sources from the period, the chapter posits the advent of a new public role for French women at the turn of the twentieth century, that of the intellectual organizer. Although still drawing on the traditional gender order, in a changing political environment this role also reflected the rise of a new kind of womanly expertise and the general restructuring of public space by gender during a period when women’s participation in civil society and the professions continued to expand and diversify.
