Fair Chances: World's Fairs and American Woman Suffrage

Abstract: For over sixty years, American pro-suffrage women consistently viewed world's fairs as the single most important and indispensable of cultural venues for their suffrage work. Despite being actively excluded from fair administrations, their unsanctioned interventions at expositions permitted suffragists to attach women's right to the franchise to the nationalist celebrations of modernity and democracy that lay at the ideological center of every world's fair. Equally significant, with few other opportunities to travel to meet with one another, activist women used expositions as crucial sites and occasions for building their movement's national and international infrastructure. Starting with the first American world's fair in New York in 1853 and ending with the last fairs held prior to the US entry into World War I, no other cultural format provided suffragists with a bigger megaphone, more relevance and legitimacy, or more regular opportunities to coordinate their efforts than world's fairs.