ABSTRACT
Building on detailed research documenting New South Wales’s women’s contributions to international exhibitions at the turn of the century, this chapter juxtaposes the Australian Margaret Windeyer’s experiences with the achievements of another soon-to-be enfranchised group of outsiders at the Exposition, Utah’s Mormon women. Emerging from isolation to acclaim at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, these women confounded their fellow delegates’ prejudices. Triumphant in Chicago, Mormons assimilated into the American feminist firmament. National acceptance provided a platform for international collaboration. Over the decade following the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Utahns who excelled in Chicago rose to international prominence. By contrast, rather than heralding a new cosmopolitanism, Windeyer’s tour constituted the apogee of early Australian feminist internationalism. Comparing New South Welsh women’s cross-border forays against those of their American frontier counterparts complicates any straightforward argument for Australian exceptionalism. Using 1893 as a starting point, the chapter traces New South Wales and Utah women’s participation in the international women’s movement, contending that structural inequalities hindered Australian women’s involvement in cross-border endeavors. Combined, Australia’s distance from the international feminism’s Atlantic nexus, and the vexatious question of “national” representation for the federating Australian colonies, put New South Welsh women at a disadvantage. Whereas Utah delegates received generous support to attend future international congresses and exhibitions from the Territory’s secular and religious authorities—who co-opted women’s encounters in an attempt to extinguish the “Mormon stigma”—the New South Wales government questioned women’s value as colonial boosters. Read alongside one another, Margaret Windeyer and her Utahn counterparts’ commitment to engage with women outside colonial and state borders, and the uneven fruits of their vision, offer an intriguing case study of the dynamics of early transnational feminist organizing at the periphery.
