Engendering Progress, Contesting Narratives: Women’s Labor Rhetorics at the 1907 Chicago Industrial Exhibit

ABSTRACT

In 1907, prominent Chicago reformers led by Ellen Henrotin and Jane Addams created an Industrial Exhibit showcasing a history of women in the workplace. Seeking to promote women’s entrance into modern, electricity-powered factories, the Exhibit’s organizers portrayed women’s labor progress in three stages: a stage of premodern, domestic-based craftwork; a stage of tenement-based, sweatshop labor; and a stage of modern, factory-based labor. The Exhibit became a site of controversy when workers demonstrating their labor objected to the Exhibit’s message that tenement sweatshops were old-fashioned and unclean by striking. Their strikes disrupted the Exhibit’s timeline of gendered progress and rearticulated the Exhibit as a site of current labor negotiations between workers, management, and the public. While affluent reformers and working women mutually sought labor reform, they used distinct and unequal rhetorical modes to communicate differing narratives about women’s work to the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist rhetorics
• spatial rhetorics
• urban communication
• work-related rhetorics

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jessica Enoch, Susan Jarratt, Matthew Heard, Kimberly Tweedale, and Robert Upchurch for their thoughtful responses to earlier versions of this essay. The author further thanks the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this essay.

Notes

¹ The “Program of Conferences” pamphlet explaining the Industrial Exhibit to visitors explicitly uses the word “primitive” to describe the tableau displays of weaving, pottery, and character writing. The longer Handbook of the Chicago Industrial Exhibit, also used to publicize the event, describes these same tableau displays as examples of “early” industries and contrasts them with tableau of “modern” industries that include the making of clothing, gloves, shoes, candy, and cigars (14).

² My understanding of the Chicago Industrial Exhibit relies on sources from the following archival collections: The Papers of Ellen Martin Henrotin, 1865–1921, in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; The Hull House Collection in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois-Chicago; Anita McCormick Blaine’s Correspondence and Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives; and the microform edition of The Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League. I also relied on these published sources about the Chicago Industrial Exhibit: McDowell, Mary. “Work for Normal Young Working Women.” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, edited by Alexander Johnson, Wm. B. Burford, 1907, pp. 319–326; Taylor, Graham Romeyn. “The Chicago Industrial Exhibit.” Charities and the Commons, vol. 18, 1907, pp. 39–45; Breckinridge, Sophonisba. “Chicago Exhibit.” Women’s Industrial News, vol. 40, 1907, pp. 656–658.

³ To find out which newspapers were printed daily in Chicago, I looked to N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual of 1907, a historic catalog of all American newspapers indexed by state, city, and circulation. I cross-referenced entries in this catalog against entries on “Selected Chicago Daily Newspapers” in English and in Foreign languages in the Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. I was able to locate archived copies of Chicago’s English-language daily newspapers with the largest circulations in March 1907. These papers are The Chicago Record-Herald, The Chicago Inter-Ocean, The Chicago Daily Tribune, and The Chicago Chronicle. Chicago’s proliferation of newspapers beyond the major dailies in the early 1900s reflected a multilingual and segregated city in which many of the papers invoked specific ethnic and racial communities as audiences. Although I identified 10 foreign language daily newspapers circulating in March 1907, I was only able to locate archived copies of Abendpost and The Polish Daily News during the timeframe of the Exhibit’s run. In addition, I sought to include The Chicago Defender, published weekly, in my corpus of newspapers because of its coverage of and influence on Black life and culture in Chicago. My search for The Defender in archives containing Chicago-based papers, assisted by archivists at the Newberry Library and Carter G. Woodson branch of the Chicago Public Library, did not turn up any copies from 1907.

⁴ Factory work was not always safer. Although the Industrial Exhibit organizers promoted factories as safer than sweatshops, factories often presented new hazards for workers. In 1911, for example, 146 garment workers in the state-of-the-art Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City perished in a fire because of gross workplace mismanagement (Hapke 51).

⁵ Addams, for example, explores sweatshops interfering with domestic life in the essays “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement” and “The Housing Problem in Chicago.” Addams was joined in her efforts by reformer Florence Kelley, who oversaw the drafting and implementation of the 1893 Factory and Workshop Inspection Law that, once implemented, regulated manufacture in tenement homes. The law specifically targeted women and children, limiting women’s daily employment to eight hours and outlawing the employment of children under 14. In addition to regulating time, the law also regulated space by outlawing manufacture in spaces designated for eating and sleeping, effectively keeping home space separate from paid work space (Illinois Joint Committee 1893).

⁶ McDowell relayed plans for the permanent Exhibit in “Industrial Show to be Permanent” in The Chicago Tribune; Executive Committee member Sophonisba Breckinridge discussed these plans with the Women’s Industrial News in an article titled “Chicago Exhibit.”