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Women from all over the country came to New Orleans in 1884 for the Woman's Department of the Cotton Centennial Exposition, that portion of the World's Fair exhibition devoted to the celebration of women's affairs and industry. Their conversations and interactions played out as a drama of personalities and sectionalism at a transitional moment in the history of the nation. These women planted seeds at the Exposition that would have otherwise taken decades to drift southward. This book chronicles the successes and setbacks of a lively cast of postbellum women in the first Woman's Department at a world's fair in the Deep South. From a wide range of primary documents, Miki Pfeffer recreates the sounds and sights of 1884 New Orleans after Civil War and Reconstruction. She focuses on how difficult unity was to achieve, even when diverse women professed a common goal. Such celebrities as Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony brought national debates on women's issues to the South for the first time, and journalists and ordinary women reacted. At the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, the Woman's Department became a petri dish where cultures clashed but where women from across the country exchanged views on propriety, jobs, education, and suffrage. Pfeffer memorializes women's exhibits of handwork, literary and scientific endeavors, inventions, and professions, but she proposes that the real impact of the six-month long event was a shift in women's self-conceptions of their public and political lives. For those New Orleans ladies who were ready to seize the opportunity of this uncommon forum, the Woman's Department offered a future that they had barely imagined.

On December 18, 1884, two days after the grand opening ceremony of the Cotton Centennial Exposition, a core of disconsolate Lady Commissioners and workers met in Howe’s private parlor at the Hotel Royal to discuss hiring policies, the placement of exhibits, and the finances of the Woman’s Department. In a show of solidarity, those who gathered reaffirmed their ambition to “render the Woman’s Department a credit to women from Manitoba to Mexico.” About finances, management had promised fifty thousand dollars to cover women’s expenses, and both theTimes-Democratand thePicayunehad said so in the fulsome details of opening

Enlightened women had spoken progressive words about jobs, education, suffrage, and reunion, but actual exhibits of women’s work were sometimes as mundane and quirky as they were advanced and muscular. Contradictions abounded. Feminine draperies and billowy banners disguised the hard-nosed determination and quick-witted strategies of temperance women. Reedy native grasses encircled ponderous objects in some areas; heavy velvet portieres framed delicate paintings in others. Flimsy tea caddies and paper flowers shared spaces with robust professional specimens and a set of sturdy false teeth. Tangled messages signified women in flux. Although Julia Ward Howe’s original plan for the Woman’s Department was

In New Orleans, many local leaders thought Caroline Merrick (1825–1908) superbly qualified to have headed the Woman’s Department. She was nearest to Howe in age and accomplishment, but the two women’s seminal experiences during the Civil War were poles apart and under separate flags. When Julia Ward Howe was composing her “Battle Hymn” in the middle of a dark night in 1862, Caroline Merrick was singlehandedly managing her brother’s plantation in Feliciana Parish. All the men were at war that year, and her husband had secreted their slaves to another parish. Merrick wrote that, at Myrtle Grove, she was

Spirits seemed to rise and fall with the temperature, and local newspapers habitually linked attendance to climate conditions. During a sundrenched week, Cole wrote that women’s tempers had improved with the weather. Of course, if there were just a few more carpenters, “the work would go on swimmingly.” Apparently, women and workers were still building sets in early February. A week later theTimes-Democratblamed poor attendance at the Exposition on “cold, bleak and overcast” skies and a cutting, gusty wind “that found its way everywhere” in buildings without insulation. Although there were occasional glimpses of spring, New Orleans temperatures

Who was this Yankee woman who could stir emotions in friend and foe? What shaped her and what did she expect to accomplish at the Cotton Centennial? By the time she came to New Orleans in 1884, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) was sixty-five and a well-known activist of women’s causes. She was neither the first nor the only nineteenth-century woman to escape domesticity by becoming a zealous clubwoman, but she had polished the role to a fine art. Oliver Wendell Holmes called her one of the most “eminentlyclubbable” women in America.² No doubt, New Orleanians knew certain details

Fortunately, some notable men surfaced to render optimism and to divert attention from the turbulence around Julia Ward Howe and the Woman’s Department. Howe was able to step out of the glare for a breather. In addition to earlier celebrity women who modeled progressive pathways, these male visitors propagated new visions of advanced women. One lead story in thePicayuneon May 6, 1885, must have caught the eye of attentive readers. It told of an extraordinary witness for woman suffrage: ex-governor John Wesley Hoyt of the Wyoming Territory. Although Hoyt claimed that he had never before made a speech

No matter how pertinent the goals or how lofty the rhetoric in the Woman’s Department, ugly images of bickering women kept creeping back in. Contrary to the official Resolution from Lady Commissioners in support of Howe in mid-April, declarations of peace had been illusory. Some predicaments seemed unintentional; the blows came with the territory of leadership. Others seemed of Howe’s own making. In any case, her vulnerabilities were beginning to show. It was not long before Director-General E. A. Burke simply quit his post. With just a few weeks left of the Exposition, his sudden resignation claimed that “requirements of

Spring arrived, and with it a host of famous women, drawn to New Orleans by the chance to speak to broad new audiences about the causes of their lives. In the Woman’s Department, workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union exhibited clear solidarity of purpose as they employed clever tactics to draw attention to their mission. Their displays could be seen a long distance away because of shining satin banners that blazed with the watchword and “musical refrain of the Temperance Woman’s working song: ‘For God and Home and Native Land.’” The group’s central hexagonal pavilion was “one of the

What culture would Julia Ward Howe and other visiting women encounter in New Orleans? To begin with, locals recognized Howe’s clout; they were no strangers to power, and they had seen it seized perversely. There was no timidity in a city where, when occupied during the Civil War, it became legendary that some ladies crossed streets rather than share sidewalks with Union soldiers, exposed their pantaloons rather than their faces to troops below their balconies, and emptied chamber pots on the heads of their enemies. Such defiant acts had prompted Union general Benjamin Butler to issue Women’s Ordinance no. 28,