North Carolina Women by Gillespie Michele;McMillen Sally G.;

Author:Gillespie, Michele;McMillen, Sally G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sallie Southall Cotten

________________

Organized Womanhood Comes to North Carolina

MARGARET SUPPLEE SMITH

“Here I am! again in Chicago to attend a special session of the Board of Lady Managers where I have the privilege of again serving in Mrs. Kidder’s place… . It is like a dream, like an Arabian Nights tale, this wonderful city of all nations— with its buildings grand within and without—glittering in the sun and holding veritably the treasures of the earth.”1 Brimming with enthusiasm and high expectations, wife of a Confederate veteran, and mother of nine, forty-seven-year-old Sallie Southall Cotten began the journal she kept faithfully from July 7 to November 3, 1893, during her stay at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, where she served as an alternate member of the Board of Lady Managers (BLM) and custodian of North Carolina’s Colonial Exhibition. Within a day of her arrival, she toured “La Rabida,” the replica of the Spanish monastery from which Columbus embarked for the new world that was Spain’s exhibition hall, participated in two tumultuous meetings of the lady managers, heard a lieder concert, saw a parade, attended receptions at the New York State and Californian buildings, met the secretary of the Navy and a famous African traveler, made new friends, and ascertained that the Virginia Dare desk she had commissioned for the fair arrived safely and looked good in its prominent place in the BLM boardroom.

Sallie Cotten was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans from all sections of the country who experienced the 1893 international fair, widely considered a “watershed”—a historic divide between an agricultural America and a modern industrial one.2 It was a celebration of American unity and “coming of age” on the international economic, political, and cultural stage.3 It was also a defining moment in the late nineteenth-century American women’s movement that gave organized white middle-class women visibility, ambition, and just plain confidence—a suitable climax to what has been called the “Women’s Century.” In the words of Bertha Honoré Palmer, president of the BLM, spoken at the dedication of the Woman’s Building: “Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the general government has just discovered women.”4

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.