Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women's Labor in 1898

ISBN-13: 9780822332961 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 305 str.

Maria Grever; Berteke Waaldijk; Mischa F. Hoyinck

Opis

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women s history, visual culture, and imperialism.A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women s Labor and the event itself the sights, the sounds, and the smells as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a Javanese village. Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women s public participation during the twentieth century."