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

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was crowned, 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, located 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. Transforming the Public Sphere provides a comprehensive social history based on extensive research. The authors describe the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture, the planning and construction of the 1898 women's exhibition, and the event itself--the sights, sounds, and smells. They discuss how the 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations xi Introduction / Antoinette Burton 1 1. Feminist and the Public Sphere 9 2. An illustrated Women’s Conference 25 3. A Panorama in the Dunes 67 4. The Exhibition Experience 111 5. Colonialism on Display 193 6. Exhibition in Print and Visual Impressions 171 7. Creating a Counterpublic 193 8. After the Summer 215 Notes 225 List of References 271 Index 297 Illustrations fall after pages 116 and 148

About the Author :
Maria Grever is Professor of History and Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a participant in the research program of the Nijmegen Center for Women’s Studies, both in the Netherlands. Berteke Waaldijk is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Review :
Despite the veritable explosion of historical work on exhibitionary culture in the last decade, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of women in organizing the transnational spectacles that dominated the culturescapes of imperial modernity ... Transforming the Public Sphere ... offers an important corrective to this oversight."--Antoinette Burton, from the introduction "A unique study based on a virtual treasury of archival materials, Transforming the Public Sphere touches on many of the most important issues of major concern today to historians of feminism and women's history."--Marilyn Boxer, coauthor of Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present