Maria Grever

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 womens contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Womens 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 womens 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 womens exhibition, and the event itself--the sights, sounds, and smells. They discuss how the exhibition displayed the range and variety of womens 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 womens support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in womens public participation during the twentieth century.

Women's Labor At Display: Feminist Claims to Dutch Citizenship and Colonial Politics around 1900

Inspired by their American and Danish counterparts, some five hundred Dutch women organized a national exhibition devoted to Womens Labor in 1898. The event took place near The Hague, lasted three months, and attracted over 90,000 visitors. The conscious and political focus on womens labor intended to show the ways in which women contributed to the Dutch nation and advocated decent employment for women as a prerequisite for citizenship. Many forms of womens labor were depicted, such as factory girls working behind machines and women from the East Indies demonstrating arts and crafts. At the exhibition conferences, teachers, social workers, and nurses spoke about their professions. This article tells the story of how the womens movement in a small, Western nation with a large colonial empire used an exhibition to put womens social position on the political agenda. In doing so, Dutch women transformed the public sphere.