MECI en la Alcaldía de Santiago de Cali

Just when women were beginning to bask in a department that promised to show the progress they had made, Julia Ward Howe and others had to hear a description of Louisiana women that must have staggered the activists among them. They attended the formal opening of the Louisiana Woman‟s Exhibit of historic objects that Creole ladies had assembled and that now was on the ground floor annexed to the state exhibit. The Times-Democrat described one or two items as “pathetic” or “odd,” but generally, the art, relics, and heirlooms the women had gleaned “from house to house” received interest and praise as a “priceless collection.”33

But women who were striving for rights and equal pay and the expansion of employment for women must have cringed to hear Judge Felix P. Poche of the Louisiana Supreme Court offer his version of the “true woman of Louisiana.”

The Times-Democrat printed part of Poche‟s address verbatim in which he described the Louisiana woman as “essentially modest in character and retiring in disposition,” not “inert and indolent,” as she was falsely accused of being. But, he said, she did not crave power. He called

32

Times-Democrat, February 19, 20, 1885. Yet, on most days, gate receipts remained well under $4000 a day. Hotels were nevertheless filling with guests, “and the principal streets were again lined with passengers, bag in hand, on their way to private lodgings.”

33

Times-Democrat, February 21, 1885. Rev. Father Pierre Lanaux, S. J., delivered the prayer, and Commissioner C. J. Barrow made introductions. Barrow declared that he received his commission to the department on February 7, 1884, and that it was the “first time that the State ever participated in an Exposition of this kind.” Times-Democrat, February 26, 1885. Grace King wrote that Lucie Claiborne “is bedeviling me to beg curiosities to be exhibited at the Exposition which I am not going to do but don‟t like to tell her so.” Grace King to May McDonnell,

November 17, 1884, Grace King Papers (MSS 1282), Louisiana State University Libraries Special Collections, Baton Rouge, LA.

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her diffident and patient; she had waited to be asked to participate and only then had collected this “sentimental part” of the Louisiana exhibit. She has “never clamored for the right of suffrage

or other prerogatives of men, the parasitic ambition of certain strong-minded women of the day. Her power is in the reign of her heart. Her strength is in the weakness of her sex, for she is the queen of the household, as she is the angel of kindness and sweetness to suffering man.” Then Poche continued in the same traditionalist way: “As a maiden, she rules society through her gentleness, her liveliness and her matchless beauty. As a wife, she shines through her modesty, her fidelity and her devotion. As a mother, she rules by her self-sacrifice and her complete abnegation.” Poche added: “In every condition of life she conceives that the true position of

woman is far and remote from the strife for power and the sharp contests for fame or glory. Her domain is ever the heart of man.” Surely, he meant these remarks as compliments, but they were conjectures. 34

For many female hearers from Louisiana, Poche‟s description of the southern woman was surely familiar and, to some, comforting. However, for progressive women from other regions, descriptors thus expressed by a distinguished jurist and printed in the newspaper must have confused them or convinced them that southern men confirmed commonly held images.

Southern women might not have wanted to abandon the notion of “ladyhood,” with its overtones of leisure and grace, in favor of “womanhood,” a label that seemed to demand more, but many hearers surely wanted to claim both.Part of the reason women watched so critically the strong-

34

Merrick wrote kindly of Mr. Poche in her memoir who, as chairman of the Suffrage Committee and later a member of the Louisiana Supreme Court, asked Merrick if she were afraid to speak for women‟s rights at the Constitution Convention in 1879. „“Afraid,‟ I said, „is not the word. I'm scared almost to death!‟ He tried to encourage me by recounting the terrors of many men similarly placed.” Caroline Merrick, Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron’s

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minded women who came to New Orleans (like Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony)was to ascertain whether their activism and independent action “unsexed” them, as was rumored. Other

southern hearers might have rejected such notions as Poche‟s, especially those attempting to assert their worthiness and right to be included as full partners in an industrial age in a “New South.” Wisely, no one asked Howe to make a formal address on this occasion of the opening of the Louisiana exhibit. Instead, her role was to present a good-luck crescent wreath to the ladies, who then decided to give it to Director-General Burke. Although she must have been aghast, Howe managed to be gracious; in a few short weeks, she would have the stronger say at the formal opening of the Woman‟s Department. 35

On the one hand, men of the Exposition urged women to be progressive, while traditional men like Poche urged them to submit to men‟s wishes. It was a crossroads for women who were

participating in the Woman‟s Department. On the other hand, these mixed messages would have been incongruous for women who had families to support. Financial need prevented them from waiting to be asked. Their surrogate, Catharine Cole, continually pointed out what niceties were appropriate and inappropriate to ask of women who worked; she preached respect for working women in all of her columns. Cole was at times strident, but she was realistic about women‟s needs. Visiting activists would soon tell women and girls not to depend on men to provide for or protect them, and they would challenge the male pressure to submit. These admonitions were also the implication of work as the “new gospel of womanhood” that Howe espoused. Yet, not all women were ready or able to work outside the home, so Cole reminded them to view exhibits

35

Times-Democrat, February 21, 1885. Just when it appeared that Howe had overcome her first missteps, “Our Picayunes” column reprinted that “The sarcastic Cincinnati Commercial Gazette that stated: „The Southern ladies at the New Orleans Exposition have got now where they like Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. They were jealous of her intellectual gifts.‟” Picayune, February 20, 1885.

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with an eye toward learning new skills or applying familiar domestic proficiency in new ways, as inventors or spinners of silk, for example. Cole also elevated the value of New Orleans

dressmakers, milliners, and able craftswomen by calling attention to their absence from the Woman‟s Department. When dreamers like Grace King viewed the hundreds of published books

by women writers, she envisioned the possibility of a different future. The collection of books might also have spurred the Christian Woman‟s Exchange to publish the cookbook the

organization had been working on since 1883. In 1885, the Times-Democrat‟s Lafcadio Hearn

published La Cuisine Creole and the Exchange published Creole Cookery, placing collected Creole recipes in print for the first time. The Exchange also used the cookbook as a fund-raising tool for years to come.36

When the financial need was greatest in the Woman‟s Department, local women confirmed their ability, and when Carnival arrived, they validated their generosity. They knew well how to organize and direct a benefit, even if the particular form (lecture) was not as familiar as balls and theatricals. With aplomb, they produced audiences for benefit entertainments that raised funds for the Woman‟s Department. During the Mardi Gras season, they could display

splendor not seen in other cities and boast an entrée to an entire cultural monde to which visitors desired access. It was finally local women‟s privilege to extend noblesse oblige, as they must

36

The Christian Woman‟s Exchange, ed. Creole Cookery (1885; reprint, New Orleans: Pelican, 2005). Their self-published history states that women had started working on the cookbook as early as 1883; see Louise Hoehn Hogan, History of the Christian Woman's Exchange (New Orleans: Christian Woman‟s Exchange, 1956), n. p. Local journalist Lafcadio Hearn published La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes, From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine (New Orleans: F.F. Hansell & Bros., 1885). These two might have been published later in the year, ready to sell at the reconstituted fair that opened in the fall of 1885 as the North, Central, and South American Exposition.

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originally have thought they would do as hostesses of the Exposition. New Orleanians took a certain pride in their city whether or not they were part of Carnival elite. Yet, as local women compared themselves to other participants in the Woman‟s Department, they must also have realized (and perhaps admitted to each other) that, despite social advantages, women in New Orleans had lagged behind other regions in educational resources, political activism, and progressive tendencies.

As Louisiana women attempted to prove parity with others, Judge Poche‟s public

description of submissive southern womanhood sat well or ill with them. Perhaps his sentiments reassured some like homemaker and poet Mary Ashley Townsend and others who used their husband‟s name rather than their own, like Mrs. R. M. Walmsley. Yet, a stereotypical or

monolithic version of “southern lady” did not exist any more than did one of “true womanhood.”

Even the staunchest independent activist, for example, Caroline Merrick admitted that she deferred to her older husband at the same time that she embarked on temperance work and women‟s rights. Ambitious women of a younger generation, like Catharine Cole and Grace King,

might have rankled at Poche‟s version of them. Yet, many southern women, including King and stalwart publisher Eliza Nicholson, were also practiced in a covert performance of submission as a strategy to have their way, evidenced in their intimate correspondence. More importantly, then as now, physical constraints, social conditioning, and the facets of the prevailing occasion complicated the self-identification of black and white women. As they contemplated “progress” in a “New South” while attempting to maintain a familiar image, New Orleans women and those

from less urban southern places reached a crossroads that would take years to sort out. But the Woman‟s Department at the Cotton Centennial Exposition was an intersection that forced

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