1884年，来自全国各地的妇女来到新奥尔良参加棉花百年博览会的妇女部，这是世界博览会上专门庆祝妇女事务和工业的部分。在这个国家历史上的一个转折时刻，他们的对话和互动表现为一场个性和宗派主义的戏剧。这些妇女在博览会上种下了种子，否则这些种子将需要几十年才能向南漂移。
这本书记述了在南方腹地的一个世界博览会上，在第一个女性部门，一个活跃的战后女性演员的成功和挫折。Miki Pfeffer从大量原始文件中重现了1884年内战和重建后新奥尔良的声音和景象。她关注的是团结是多么困难，即使不同的女性声称有一个共同的目标。朱莉娅·沃德·豪（Julia Ward Howe）和苏珊·B·安东尼（Susan B.Anthony）等名人首次将有关妇女问题的全国性辩论带到了南方，记者和普通女性对此做出了反应。在世界工业和棉花百年博览会上，妇女事务部成了一个培养皿，在那里文化冲突，但来自全国各地的妇女就礼仪、工作、教育和选举权交换意见。Pfeffer纪念了女性的手工作品、文学和科学成就、发明和职业展览，但她提出，为期六个月的活动的真正影响是女性对其公共和政治生活自我概念的转变。对于那些准备好抓住这次不寻常论坛机会的新奥尔良女士来说，妇女事务部提供了一个她们几乎无法想象的未来。
Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair
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.
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