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The Women's Building at the 1893 Exposition Architecture, Statuary, Murals

The Women's Building: Sophie Hayden, architect
Women's Building Statuary: Rideout, Yandell, Rope
Primitive Woman Mural: Mary Macmonnies-Low
Other Murals (Fuller, Sherwood, Emmet, Sewell)
Library Ceiling & Interior Designs:  The Wheelers
Arkansas Building: Jean Loughborough, architect
New York Building Murals (Dodson,  Bush-Brown)
 

The Women's Building, 1893 World's Exposition:

 Sophie Hayden, architect (1868-1953)
 

Photo/commentary here. Panaramic View of Women's Building here.

Sophia Hayden, one of the few women architects in nineteenth-century America, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, as her first project, designed the 80,000 square-foot, two-story building called the Woman's Building.  A young woman, Hayden evidently suffered some kind of breakdown by the end of the project and never again designed a building.

Responses to the building (and to a woman architect) were mixed. The Italian Renaissance style building was considered by some viewers to be too plain and unassertive compared with the more flamboyant male-designed buildings elsewhere at the Fair (see an example here), but many women viewers felt it was "just enough." Other critics, knowing the architect's sex, thought they saw "feminine" traits like "delicacy" and "timidity" in the building's architecture. Hayden's design for the rectangular rotunda topping the Women's Building also received some criticism, but other sources remarked on how, inside the building, it provided a marvelous source of light and radiance.
 

Interior of Women's Building (Gallery of Honor)

In charge of this all-woman project was a Board of Lady Managers chaired by Bertha Potter Palmer, a wealthy and influential patron of the arts. Placing women in charge of their own building was considered a rather revolutionary idea at the time and was not enthusiastically supported by some Fair authorities.  In addition, various women's groups, some more conservative, others more liberal, competed for control of the"message" that the Women's Building would communicate about women.  (See the Harriet Hosmer entry and links here for one example of these power struggles.)  Several famous suffragist leaders Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony were, however, featured as speakers at the World's Congress of Representative Women.
 

Program of Speakers--at the World's Congress of
Representative Women, World's Columbian Exposition 1893.
(Read Lucy Stone's address delivered at the Women's Building
and a short biography of Lucy Stone.
 

Despite this welter of competing interests, goals, and criticisms, the Women's Building turned out to be a successful as well as historic project as far as most participants were concerned. It housed a vast array of exhibits on women's progress from primitive to modern times in the arts, crafts, sciences, education, and labor. The Library, for instance, had 7,000 volumes of books by women (including 47 translations and editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) produced between the 16th to 19th Century.  As Fryer notes, "Displays ranged from the Queen of Italy's handmade lace and cigarettes rolled by Spanish women laborers to those showing increasing interest among middle-class women in technological invention and 'scientific' approaches to philanthropy: portable sinks and dish-heaters, for example, portable bathtubs and mechanical dusters, all invented by women, women's patented transportation systems, typewriters and a citywide waterworks project." Some international emphasis was achieved with additional women's exhibits from Siberia, Siam, Japan, Norway, Austria, Belgium, India, Sweden, Brazil, and the Cape of Good Hope.

Although the Women's Building succeeded in highlighting women's work and accomplishments, Berthe Potter Palmer, the chair of the Board of Lady Managers, believed that its greatest significance was that Congress had actually agreed to authorize and fund a building devoted to women.  As she put it, "Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact the General Government has just discovered women" (source).

Berthe Potter       Palmer

Women's Building Statuary and Relief Panels

Alice Rideout, sculptor (1874? - ??)
Enid Yandell, sculptor (1870 - 1934)
Ellen Mary Rope (1855 - 1934)
 

Enlightenment Statuary Group

Three Virtues Statuary Group (drawing)

Rideout's "Angel" Statuary Groups

Alice Rideout's twelve-foot allegorical statuary groups adorned the four corners of the roof of the Women's Building.  The "Enlightenment" group consisted of "the Spirit of Civilization holding the Torch of Wisdom."  The bird of wisdom was at the base, along with a woman in cap and gown rising above a dejected woman searching for knowledge.

The "Three Virtues" group had a central figure of "Innocence."  At the base was the pelican symbolizing love and sacrifice, accompanied by a nun sacrificing her jewels on an altar and a woman charitably nursing two orphans.

Alice Rideout also created friezes on the 45-foot long pediment and on the panels over the doors.  The images represented literature and art, various virtues such as "beneficence," and women's occupations.

Little biographical information is available online about Alice Rideout. Born in California, she was the ward of John Quinn, a well-know art collector from San Francisco. She studied at the San Francisco School of Design and by age 19 was working on a bust of President Benjamin Harrison when she was commissioned to work on statuary at the 1893 World Fair. Afterwards, she disappears from history.

Enid Yandell's Caryatids

Statuary Links:
Angel" group statuary (scroll down the page)--Chapter 5 from Three Girls in a Flat by Enid Yandell.
The Book of the Fair, Chap. 11 The Women's Department --very detailed.
National and State Buildings (scroll down to the page to the Women's Building).
More information on Enid Yandell.

Ellen Mary Rope's Panel Reliefs

Rope designed four plaster-relief panels (6 feet tall images of "Faith, "Hope," "Charity" and "Heavenly Wisdom") for the Women's Building at the Chicago 1893 World Columbian Exposition.  See this IMAGE OF "CHARITY," plus more information on Ellen Mary Rope.

 
Primitive Woman Mural, Gallery of Honor,
Women's Building, 1893 World's Exposition

Mary Louise Fairchild MacMonnies-Low (1858 - 1946)

Primitive Woman (mural) by Mary Macmonnies-Low--
the mural opposite Cassatt's Modern Woman mural (view Cassatt's mural here)
in the Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.
Click here to see a larger photo of MacMonnies-Low's mural (scroll down the page).

Unlike the impressionistic mural by Mary Cassatt, the "Primitive Woman" mural by Mary Macmonnies-Low at the oppositie end of the Gallery of Honor in the Women's Building was created in a more traditional neo-classical style.  Its idealized figures were more in accord with the taste of the general public that still considered Cassatt's impressionist mural to be experimental and unorthodox.

According to one report, MacMonnies-Low's mural depicted primitive women "engaged in the various industries and pursuits of her time. The scene is out of doors, with a blue lake and its bordering trees for a background." Another source claims that "the central figure represent[s] motherhood, with women on either side sowing seed and carrying jars of water."

Macmonnies-Low Links:

Three Girls in a Flat, Chap. 5 --scroll down the page.
The Book of the Fair, Chap. 11, Women's Building. 
More information on Macmonnies-Low.

Other Murals in Gallery of Honor,
Women's Building, 1893 World's Exposition

 Lucia Fairchild Fuller (1870/2-1924)
Amanda Brewster Sewell (1859-1926)
Rosina Emmet Sherwood (1854-1948)
Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952)
 

Women of Plymouth by Lucia Fairchild Fuller--
mural in Women's Building, 1893 World's Exposition.
Study for the Women of Plymouth mural, plus commentary, here.

The "Women of Plymouth" mural by twenty-three year old Lucia Fuller depicted seventeen early American women engaged in daily tasks such as washing, educating children, and spinning. Although other murals commissioned for the Women's Building at the 1893 World Fair seem to have disappeared, her Women of Plymouth was found in a deteriorating building in Cornish. One source claims that her mural was never shown at the World Fair because of the anachronistic error of showing tree stumps sawn smooth rather than roughly axed by the Pilgrims, but photos of the Honor of Gallery in the Women's Building show her mural on the wall.

Arcadia  (mural)
by Amanda B. Sewell
 
 

Republic Welcomes her Daughters (mural) by Rosina Sherweed

Art, Literature, and Imagination (mural) by Lydia Emmet

Two murals hanging on wall of Gallery of Honor, Women's Building, World Fair 1893.
Sewell's Arcadia (left); Fuller's Women of Plymouth (right)

More information on Lucia Fairchild Fuller.
More information on Amanda Brewster Sewell.
More information on Rosina Sherwood.
More information on Lydia Emmet.

Library Ceiling Mural and Interior Decorations,
Women's Building, 1893 World's Exposition:

Dora Wheeler Keith, muralist (1856-1940)
Candace Thurber Wheeler, interior design (1827-1923)

Library Ceiling Mural by Dora Wheeler Keith

 According to one source, "In the central oval, enclosed by a wreath of white lilies, literature is typified by a shapely woman, science by a man in scholastic garb, and imagination by an angel with its outstretched wings. Between this oval and the Venetian border which encloses the ceiling, are loops and folds of drapery in softly blended hues representing the tints of sky and landscape, and at the four corners are medallions symbolic of history, romance, poetry, and drama."  (Source)
 

The Wheelers, Mother and Daughter

The designer of the library ceiling was Dora Wheeler Keith, daughter of Candace Wheeler (see below).  Dora was born in Jamaica and educated at the Art Students League.  She won awards at the Pan-American Exposition in New York in 1886 and the Louis Prang Prize for greeting card designs in 1885-6. At the 1893 World Fair, she also exhibited Portrait of Lawrence Hutton (image unavailable) in the Fine Arts Palace.

Supervising the interior decorations of the Women's Building was Candace Wheeler, mother of Dora Wheeler Keith and the most important textile and interior designer of the Nineteenth Century.  Inspired by the embroideries she saw at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Wheeler professionalized the role of women in decorative design by founding the Society of Decorative Art in New York and the Women's Exchange, a self-help organization which taught women applied arts and thus gave them a means of economic independence.  After a period of time with the Tiffany Company producing designs for prestigious clients such as the White House and Mark Twain, Wheeler developed Associated Artists, an all-women design firm in New York (1883-1907). Her textile designs, practical and affordable for middle-class women, were often based on American plants and flowers.  Wheeler also wrote books on botany, gardening, and art.

Biography/1 image--of Dora Wheeler
Biography--excellent and detailed life of Candace Wheeler
Candace Wheeler garden book illustrated by Dora Wheeler--scroll down the page
9 images by Candace Wheeler and her daughter Dora.
Candace Wheeler Fabric and Wallpaper Designs--many examples.
The Dream City--Candace Wheeler article on the 1893 World Fair in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 86, Issue 516, May 1893, pp. 830-846.

Arkansas Building, 1893 World's Exposition

Jean Loughborough, architect

The Arkansas Building, designed by Jean Loughborough,
was Renaissance style, 60 x 85 feet.  It had a central
 court (30 ft sq) with fountain and a glass cupola over it.

 
Murals in the New York Building, 1893 World's Exposition

Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown (1857-1944)
Sarah P. Dodson (1847-1906)
 

According to one source, "In the salon or reception rooms are several mural paintings, all of them executed by prominent artists. A panel by Mrs. Bush-Brown shows a group of young girls dancing on the sward beneath the boughs of an apple tree, covered with the delicate blossoms of spring. On another panel Mrs. Clements depictures the mellow fruit, with peasants about to gather the fruitage of the year. In one of the two panels by Jane Rongier, poetic or intellectual life is symbolized in the form of a young girl wandering, book in hand, adown a forest path, her features reflecting the thoughts suggested by some inspiring passage. On the other panel, entitled, "Serious or Family Life," a young mother stands at the threshold of her cottage, spinning from the distaff, her eyes fixed lovingly on the cradle in which her babe is sleeping. A fifth panel by Sarah P. Dodson represents a number of female peasants resting in the harvest field toward set of sun, and grouped around an aged woman, to whose words they listen eagerly" (source).

More information on Margaret Leslie Bush-Brown
More information on Sarah P. Dodson.
 

Women's Building Links:

Biography of Sophie Hayden
Tour the Fair--short description, including a paragraph on Women's Building
The Board of Lady Managers--Ch, 5, Three Girls in a Flat (1892) by Enid Yandell, Jean Loughborough, and Laura Hayes, pp. 53-82; a first-hand report on the planning, governing, and exhibitions in the Women's Building.
The Book of the Fair: The Women's Department--detailed description of every aspect of the Women's Building.
Women's Buildings and World Exhibitions--scholarly article on the history of Women's Buildings at world fairs; middle section is on the 1893 Women's Building in Chicago. Critiques the mixed gender messages of the Fair.
The Women's Pavilion--student project; good summary information on the Women's Building
The Design and Decoration of the Women's Building--dissertation abstract about the Fair's "new woman" image.
Spheres of Influence:The Role of Women at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915--good scholarly article.
(For more on the physical dimensions, click here--scroll down to "Women's Building.")
 

Some of the above information came from these sources:

Carolyn Kinder Carr and Sally. "Mary Cassatt and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies: The Search for Their 1893 Murals." American Art, 18 (Winter 1994): 53-69.

Jeanne Madeline Weimann. The Fair Women. Chicago 1981.

Maud Howe Elliott, ed.  Art and Handicraft in the Women's Building of the World's Columbian Exposition.   Rand, McNally, 1894.

F. Graeme Chalmers. Women in the Nineteenth Century Art World. Westport 1988.

Paul V. Galvin. World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Library Digital History Collection, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Judith Fryer. Felicitous Space. U of North Carolina Press 1986, pp. 23-6.

The Web-Book of the Fair:  A Window on the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

 

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These pages are for educational use only. 

Text written by K. L. Nichols
 

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Suggestions/Comments: knichols@pittstate.edu
Posted: 6-1-02; Updated: 5-27-05