Global Voices from the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Feminisms, Transnationalism and the Archive

Abstract

This introductory chapter addresses the historical, conceptual, and methodological contributions of our book and synthesizes the specific arguments of each chapter. In the overview of the structure of the book, we compare the findings and link the analyses of chapters focusing on nationality, country, or language and those focusing on individual authors. We give an overview of the collections not addressed in separate chapters, which typically represented their countries by one to a few titles. Thus, we offer a comprehensive overview and comparisons across all 23 countries’ collections displayed at the 1893 Exposition in the Woman’s Building Library other than the United States. We consider how our work collectively adds to an understanding of international women’s culture, activism, modernism, and globalism at the end of the nineteenth century: a historical moment coinciding with the height of industrial optimism and characterized by shifting ideas around gender roles and the changing status of women in society. We recognize the differences and similarities in women’s networks and in a global context. We also address the methodological frameworks used by the chapters’ authors, and their engagement with the historiography of women’s movements, and give an overview of prior scholarship and a note on how this collection of essays came about.