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

by Maria Grever (Author)

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, 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, held 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.

A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women's Labor and the event itself-the sights, the sounds, and the smells-as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 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.

Back Jacket

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

Author Biography

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.