Fall 2010 - University of Illinois Press

Gender Studies / World History
Gendering the Fair
Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs
Edited by TJ Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn
Foreword by Robert W. Rydell
Interrogating the gendered nature of world’s fairs
throughout history
“Gendering the Fair makes a signal contribution to our understanding of
world’s fairs, gender, and modernization. The essays force a rethinking not
only of world’s fairs but also of the often-contested and always interesting
relationships among gender, nationality, and the formation of feminine
and masculine identity.”
—Candy Gunther Brown, author of The Word in the World: Evangelical
Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America
This field-defining work opens the study of world’s fairs to women’s and
gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity,
exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. Gendering
the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor
in the world’s fairs’ incredible power to shape public opinions of nations,
government, and culture.
Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and
locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries’ exhibits
and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and
international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries
and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago
to Paris, the essays cover topics including women’s work at the fairs;
the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism;
and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers’ experience of
the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by
preeminent world’s fair historian Robert W. Rydell.
Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois,
Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski,
Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne
Wohlcke.
TJ Boisseau is an associate professor of gender and cultural history at the
University of Akron and the author of White Queen: May French-Sheldon
and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity. Abigail M. Markwyn
is an assistant professor of history at Carroll University in Waukesha,
Wisconsin.
OCTOBER
288 PAGES. 6.125 x 9.25 INCHES
32 BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
CLOTH (UNJACKETED), 978-0-252-03558-6. $70.00x £49.00
PAPER, 978-0-252-07749-4. $28.00s £18.99
Also of Interest
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair
A Century of Progress
CHERYL R. GANZ
Cloth, 978-0-252-03357-5, $39.95 £27.99
The World’s Columbian Exposition
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893
NORMAN BOLOTIN AND CHRISTINE LAING
Paper, 978-0-252-07081-5, $21.95 £14.99
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