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

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.