Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

by Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

At a meeting of the board, held in the Administration Building March 1, 1904, in response to a call by the president for a report from the committee on awards, Mrs. Hanger, chairman of the committee, said:

This committee was named by Mrs. Manning after our last meeting, as follows: Mrs. Hanger, Mrs. Knott, Miss Egan, Mrs. Porter, and Mrs. Hunsicker. I happened to be here in January, and asked Miss Egan to go with me to see Mr. Skiff. We waited two or three hours and saw Mr. Skiff about fifteen minutes. It had been said there were 200 jurors to be appointed, and we would only have the appointing of 35 or 40 of them. He assured us that the lists could not be made out as the exhibits were not installed. He gave us some instructions in regard to the selection of jurors, saying that they must stand for intellectual ability; it did not matter how many people applied for appointment, we must be governed by that.

I had a letter from Mrs. Manning suggesting that I try again. I wrote to Mr. Stevens and he communicated with Mr. Skiff, and later repeated to me the same thing. We have had quite a number of names suggested, and I have written to the other members of the committee asking them to come here as soon as the exhibits are in place. I hope we can hold that meeting very early, but until after that meeting I do not feel that we have anything to report.

In response to questions from members of the board as to whether Mr. Skiff was to be understood to mean that there were but 35 or 40 things to be exhibited at the exposition which were made in whole or in part by women, Mrs. Hanger said that Mr. Skiff said the board "would only have the appointing of 35 or 40 women—that it was a matter of expense and that they must assist in keeping it down."

This decision was a source of great disappointment to the board, as it has been shown most conclusively that scarcely anything is manufactured that women do not at least share in the production or process of its manufacture. The act of Congress stated that there should be appointed by this board a member of every jury judging "any work that may have been produced in whole or in part by female labor," and the members were averse to an abridgment of the authority vested in them by the wording of the act.

Expositions are a natural and useful factor to women in that by their means new avenues of employment that are constantly being opened to them may be collectively demonstrated, and it can be shown in which of these they may share and excel or be most successful, and statistics may be compiled showing the proportion of wages that women receive for their share of labor performed equivalent to that of men, and other helpful information and facts procured which are not easily ascertained by other means.

The Departments of Machinery, Electricity, Transportation Exhibits, Forestry, Mines and Metallurgy, Fish and Game, and Physical Culture were not given representation by the Exposition Company on the group juries appointed by the board of lady managers, and while it is undoubtedly true that all of these fields have been invaded by women as assistant workers, yet evolution and progress in these lines are necessarily slow where their opportunities have not been commensurate with those of men and more congenial employment is undoubtedly afforded in education, art, liberal arts, manufactures, agriculture, horticulture, anthropology, and social economy.

The "Special Rules and Regulations providing for an International Jury and Governing the System of Making Awards," as applicable to the board of lady managers, read as follows:

The total number of jurors in the international jury of awards shall be approximately 2 per cent of the total number of exhibitors, but not in excess of that number, and each nation having fifty exhibitors or more shall be entitled to representation on the jury. The number of jurors for each art or industry, and for each nationality represented, shall, as far as practicable, be proportional to the number of exhibitors and the importance of the exhibits.

Of this selected body of international jurors, three graded juries will be constituted: One, the general organization of group juries; two, department juries; three, a superior jury.