Overview
Amongst the women discussed are Bertha Honoré Palmer, Louise Noun, Samella Lewis, Julia Miles, Miriam Colón, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Bernice Steinbaum, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Martha Wilson, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Kim Berman, Gilane Tawadros, Joanna Smith, and Veomanee Douangdala.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780813576268 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rutgers University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2018 |
| Series: | Junctures: Case Studies in Women's Leadership , #3 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 321 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 16 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Ferris Olin is a distinguished professor emerita, and art historian, curator, women's studies scholar, and librarian, who held numerous leadership positions at Rutgers University, including co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art (a member of the Rutgers Institute for Women's Leadership Consortium), curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series (the longest running exhibition space in the US for emerging and established women artists), founding head of the Margery Somers Foster Center, executive officer of the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women and the Blanche, Edith, and Irving Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies, and director of the University's Art Library. She has held numerous leadership positions within national and state art organizations.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bertha Honoré Palmer
A "New Woman"?
Background
Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849–1918) was an unlikely "new woman." Through her husband's wealth and position, she was at the top of the social class pyramid of Chicago. Her husband lavished jewels and clothes upon her. She started out by leading a life in which she was the stereotype of the ultimate feminine ideal of the white upper class, fulfilling traditional roles as wife, mother, hostess, and signifier of her husband's wealth and success. According to her son, "Before my mother became enamored with Florida, she had long been acknowledged as the fashionable queen of Chicago. Noted for her beauty, her wit, her fabulous pearls and diamonds, and the enormous Gothic Palmer castle. Of her jewels, father would say, 'There she stands with $200,000 just around her neck!'" But she was always interested in politics and business. With the rise of the discourse on women's rights during the second half of the nineteenth century, Palmer took advantage of the fact that philanthropy became an accepted outlet for white women of her class to go beyond the domestic sphere and exercise leadership outside the home. She initially branched out into activism on behalf of poor women, mostly immigrants. But Palmer went further. She became the driving force behind the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It was one of the first times that women organized a major public project by themselves in the United States. The success of the Woman's Building resulted in establishing a new image of women as capable in the arena of politics and public life in general. Much of that success had to do with the leadership of Bertha Palmer. She proved capable of managing a very complex situation, varying from mediating groups of women with differing ideologies to convincing male politicians not only to approve a pavilion celebrating women's work and accomplishments at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 but also to provide funding for it. There is no question that her position in the forefront of Chicago's white society gave her entrée to money and power in both Chicago and Washington. She used that position to promote what she felt women deserved. Despite the fact that she would not have accepted the terminology, in exercising her power on behalf of women, she became the prototypical "new woman," unafraid to venture beyond the domestic domain into the realm of politics and business, up to that point reserved for men.
Bertha Honoré Palmer lived in an exceptional period, the last half of the nineteenth century extending into the first quarter of the twentieth century. Just to name a few key historic markers, the automobile began to replace the horse and buggy; inoculations and other modern medical practices initiated an era of better health and longer lives; railroads crisscrossed the world; airplanes became tools for war as well as a means for faster travel; the keys to understanding physics, from the atom to the cosmos, were discovered; colonialism reached its peak; slavery was abolished in the United States after the horrifying Civil War, but Reconstruction put an end to any kind of equality for African Americans; and empires grew and collapsed. Among the most significant changes in this amazing period was the gradual emancipation of women in the United States and Western Europe. It must be said that this emancipation had mixed results. It was mostly limited to white middle-class and independent wealthy women, but nevertheless it set the stage for the fuller empowerment of women that came in the twentieth century. The principles of women's suffrage were established, thus giving women a say in their political future even though it may not have been made law until later; it became permissible, if not completely acceptable, for women to enter the economic sphere of the modern industrial world in various ways as employees, although not as executives or board members; and in some cultural fields, women began to emerge as significant figures, particularly as writers. Women artists, composers, and writers still were considered in second place as compared to their male colleagues.
Bertha Honoré was born in Kentucky. The members of the family treasured their Southern values even though they moved to Chicago in the early 1850s, when the city was only a prairie town. She was raised in luxury, her father being a successful businessman; Bertha Honoré was to be a "Southern belle" even though she was living in raw frontier Chicago. Her future husband, Potter Palmer, also came to live in Chicago at about the same time. They were married in 1870 when she was twenty-one. Potter Palmer was forty-four. By the time of their marriage, Potter Palmer was already wealthy, worth more than seven million dollars. He had established a department store in Chicago, where he made many innovations that led to modern merchandising. Among his modernizations were a generous exchange policy, credit, and attention to customer satisfaction. It was one of the few places in the city, according to the social mores of the time, where it was all right for upper class and middle class women to be seen unaccompanied without disapprobation. He sold the store to Marshall Field in 1865 — Field is famous for creating the classic structure of the department stores of the twentieth century.
Following his career as a merchant, Palmer became a real estate developer in the city. Even before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, he was buying property. Before the fire, Lake Street, which ran along the canal, was the main thoroughfare for Chicago's businesses. Palmer began acquiring property along what eventually became State Street. He made the street continuous and attempted to persuade the city to widen the street so that it would become more impressive, but the city government refused. Before the fire, State Street had a curious pattern, turning corners around buildings constructed before it had become a continuous right of way. All those buildings were destroyed in the fire, thus providing Palmer with the opportunity to widen the street with new buildings constructed alongside the now-straight curbs; State Street replaced Lake Street as the center of Chicago's downtown. Palmer had built a luxury hotel called the Palmer House, today still in existence, as a wedding gift for his wife. It burned to the ground during the Great Fire, but Palmer then promptly rebuilt it. He also opened up the lakefront for luxury housing by building the Palmer mansion on the lake. Before then, the lakeside had been considered a swampy area unfit for housing. Palmer saw its potential, which was soon realized by others who followed his lead, making Lake Shore Drive the richest neighborhood in the city.
Being wealthy and living in a young city like Chicago, Bertha Honoré Palmer had flexibility that most women of her era did not. The growth of cities like Chicago, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of bourgeois culture triggered new attitudes toward the status of women. But the concept of the "new woman" could be applied only to the women of the white middle and upper class. People of color, working-class women, and women in rural areas did not have the leisure time to become "new women." The "new women" were supposed to be educated, able to converse knowingly about political and cultural affairs, and able to ride bicycles while maintaining their traditional femininity.
Palmer set about building an art collection, one of the ways in which a white woman of her class could move beyond herassigned stations as wife, mother, hostess, and symbol of her husband's wealth and success. She employed an art agent named Sarah Tyson Hallowell. The two traveled to Paris, where Hallowell introduced Palmer to Mary Cassatt, the American painter who lived mostly in Paris and was a member of the Impressionist circle. Cassatt herself came from a distinguished and wealthy Philadelphia family, so they possibly became such good friends because they came from the same kind of social circles. Cassatt, in turn, introduced Hallowell and Palmer to Impressionist artists such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro. At Cassatt's suggestion, Palmer bought her first painting, a stage scene by Degas. Palmer then went on to buy more works by Degas, as well as paintings by the other Impressionists. At one time, she owned more than ninety works by Monet. The collection she donated to the Art Institute of Chicago is often compared to the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York given by Louisine Havemeyer, a women's suffrage activist and advocate married to the sugar baron Henry O. Havemeyer of the American Sugar Refining Company, who was also introduced to the Impressionists by Mary Cassatt. In both instances, it is these collections, formed by women, that are the basis of the excellence of the Impressionist holdings at both institutions.
Parallel to the inclusion of white women in spheres outside the home, the 1870s and 1880s saw the expansion of discourse on women's rights. The movement itself was split between those who saw the most important issue as suffrage and those who concentrated on such aspects of women's empowerment as equal pay for equal work. The latter were of the opinion that the country was not yet ready for women to vote and that the right to vote would come later, when women were more firmly established as having the right to carry on their lives outside as well as inside the home. Palmer was firmly in favor of the second point of view.
By becoming an active member of Chicago's women's clubs, Palmer implemented her belief in women's rights by participating in activities that would lead to social betterment for women — primarily services that would help the hordes of immigrant women from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Italy, and other parts of the world where conditions were violent and poverty stricken. Women's clubs came into existence in the United States after the Civil War. They provided an accepted way for white middle- and upper-class women who had leisure time to participate in activities outside the home. Through the clubs, women like Palmer also had the opportunity to turn their energies toward developing leadership skills.
The missions and programming of women's clubs revealed their ambivalent nature. On the one hand, they sustained the traditional separation of male and female spheres. On the other, they provided a way for women to exert their leadership abilities and interests beyond running a household and raising children. The activities of women's clubs were twofold. They provided intellectual and cultural stimulation in the form of reading groups and speakers. They also addressed themselves to civic duties and social welfare. They encouraged literacy and founded libraries; they established schools and initiated settlement houses — buildings set aside for various activities to help immigrant women — workshops to learn English, nutrition, and skills such as the use of sewing machines for job eligibility. Palmer was an active supporter of Jane Addams, whom she came to know through their mutual membership in the Chicago women's clubs, and supported Addams in establishing Hull House, one of the first and best known of the settlement houses in the United States.
Bertha Honoré Palmer's entrances into art collecting and philanthropy were acceptable ways for a rich white American woman to expand her activities beyond the domestic sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. But a particular event caused Palmer to abandon the conventional behavior of a woman of her social standing and take on a leadership role that was much more aggressive, resulting in the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
In the late 1880s, excitement arose nationally over the concept of a world's fair to celebrate the quadricentennial of Columbus's voyages. After a great deal of lobbying and promises of funding so excessive as to be considered flamboyant by Chicago's leading citizens, Chicago won the competition over New York. President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill on April 25, 1890, placing the exposition in the city of Chicago. The bill established two oversight boards, both all-male, but it also included an amendment setting up a "Board of Lady Managers." The suffragists are generally given credit for the passage of the amendment, which was brought to the floor of the House of Representatives by William Springer. Susan B. Anthony, one of the founders of the suffrage movement, and Myra Bradwell, an activist on behalf of women's rights and a lawyer who for many years was denied admission to the Illinois Bar by both the Illinois Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court because she was a woman, led the effort. They argued for women to be included on the two major boards, but their request ended with the establishment of a separate women's board. The Board of Lady Managers was a national one, with members from various states. It had more than one hundred members, making it larger than the commission itself.
Bertha Honoré Palmer was elected president of the Board of Lady Managers. This position brought with it the potential for national leadership. Could a socialite from Chicago become that leader? Palmer faced multiple problems. The mission of the board was to decide how to ensure the acknowledgment of women in the Exposition. Despite dissension over her leadership, the board reached a decision that the best way to show the world the value of women was to have a Woman's Building, but the outlook was dire. Congress was not going to provide funding.
Resolution
At this juncture, Palmer stepped in and exerted leadership to make the Woman's Building a reality. First she had to gain control of the board. A struggle arose over the leadership right at the start. Two groups competed for control of the board, both white. One was the Chicago Women's Auxiliary, also known as the Chicago Women's Department. It was created when more than two thousand women met with the mayor and other dignitaries to insist on the inclusion of women in the formation of the fair. They were an important factor in the success of the lobbying effort for the fair to take place in Chicago. The Women's Auxiliary had a prestigious pedigree. It was composed of women (all white) who came from the highest social levels in Chicago. They were active, like Palmer, in the work to improve the conditions for poor people in the city as a moral task. One of the reasons that the Women's Auxiliary played a significant role in bringing the fair to Chicago was because the members were all married to leading business figures in Chicago — their headquarters were in the same building as the offices of the World's Fair Corporation, and the men who were lobbying for the fair to come to Chicago expected the women to raise much of the needed funds. Indeed, Palmer and the other women from her social circle were crucial to the local effort to raise funds in Illinois, since through their clubs and philanthropy, they had created a network of wealthy people who could be persuaded to help with the costs of the fair.
The other faction seeking control of the board was the Queen Isabella Association, a national women's organization whose membership, unlike the socialites of the auxiliary, was middle class, comprising mostly professional women who represented a new set of working women educated to assume higher-level positions than factory jobs or their equivalent, which were more usual for women. As such, it could be said that the Isabellas truly represented the "new woman." They selected Queen Isabella as the name for the association because it was she who funded Columbus to make the voyages to the Americas, and therefore she should be honored at the fair.
The struggle for power was ideological as well as classist and personal. The Women's Auxiliary and the Isabellas had divergent views on women's roles. The Isabellas, as opposed to the auxiliary women, were suffragists. They believed that the most important issue was giving women the vote rather than helping poor women; they saw the latter activity as being only an extension of the traditional woman's role as nurturer.
Mrs. Palmer wasted no time in assuming leadership of the board. She persuaded the federal government committee that had oversight over the Board of Lady Managers that such a large board was unmanageable, and it would be necessary to set up a smaller decision-making body if anything were to be accomplished. The committee agreed, and she went ahead to establish an executive committee that she could control by selecting all the members herself. Palmer believed the bylaws gave the president that right. She appointed twenty-five women, mostly from her own Chicago social circle, and women she knew in other states — wealthy upper-class women likely to vote with her. The suffragist members of the board reacted quickly. They realized that the Chicago socialites were now in charge, and therefore the board would not make suffrage a priority.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Junctures in Women's Leadership"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin.
Excerpted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
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Table of Contents
1 Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918)Philanthropist, president of the Board of Lady Managers, Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893
2 Louise Noun (1908 – 2002)
Philanthropist, art collector, scholar
3 Samella Lewis (1924-)
Artist, art historian, arts administrator
4 Julia Miles (1930-)
Theater director and producer; founder, Women’s Project Theater
5 Miriam Colón (1936-2017)
Broadway and Hollywood film actress; founder, Puerto Rican Traveling Theater
6 Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (1940-)
Artist and activist
7 Bernice Steinbaum (1941-)
Gallerist and advocate for diversity
8 Anne d’Harnoncourt (1943-2008)
Director, Philadelphia Museum of Art
9 Martha Wilson (1947-)
Artist, activist, archivist; founder, Franklin Furnace Archive
10 Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (1950-)
Choreographer; founder of the dance company, Urban Bush Women
11 Kim Berman (1960-)
Artist, activist; founder, Artist Proof Studio and Phumani Paper, South Africa
12 Gilane Tawadros (1965-)
Arts administrator; founding director, Institute for International Visual Arts (InIVA), United Kingdom
13 Veomanee Douangdala (1976-) and Joanne Smith (1976-)
Social and cultural entrepreneurs, Laos