Julia Ward Howe:

Gender Warrior or Gender Subversive? Nineteenth-Century Femininity at the 1884 World’s Fair

By Authors

Did Julia Ward Howe’s leadership of the Women’s Department at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair make her a gender warrior? Perhaps even a gender subversive? The rhetoric surrounding her performance certainly focused on her non-normative femininity. When the ladies of New Orleans objected to Howe’s appointment, male exposition organizers argued that there was something different about Howe. Richard Nixon, the secretary of the Board of Management, contended that “no Southern women possessed the national reputation and executive ability, nor the wealth, time, and physical capacity that Howe did” (Pfeffer 18). Although she possessed a particular contempt for Howe, Picayune Reporter Catherine Cole likewise acknowledged the northerner’s unusual status in the male-dominated public culture of the late-nineteenth-century US, writing that “Howe had an admirable national reputation founded on her intellectual power and social position” (18). And, in her memoir, New Orleans writer Grace King later granted that Howe mobilized her women delegates with “‘masculine competence’” (184). An initial glance at Howe’s 1884 publicity could suggest that she departed from traditional models of femininity. There is a temptation to conclude that, by taking on this leadership position, she expanded and resisted gendered limits. HH Howe’s work in New Orleans maintained a strong emphasis on white middle-class values in ways that and ultimately reorganized any expansion or subversion of femininity back into the narrow confines of what historian Barbara Welter famously named “True Womanhood.” 

It’s clear that women like Howe confronted significant pressure to conform to gender norms. As described by Welter, the hallmarks of True Womanhood, “by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband” (Welter 152), were as follows: domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity. Religious piety rested at the center of the True Woman’s virtue, signifying the root of women’s strength and the attribute most sought after by marriageable young men. Nineteenth-century definitions of womanhood outlined that women’s fondness for religion was bestowed upon them by heavenly powers so that they could cast their beams onto “the naughty world of men” (Welter 152). Embodying the attributes of a True Woman was considered “a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand” (Welter 152). And yet, a myriad of early American women showed themselves to be gender warriors by crusading for better conditions and wider opportunities. Gender warriors engaged in a war on behalf of their gender, but ultimately operated on the battlefield that lay within the confines of their assigned gender. As outlined by Laura Laffrado in Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing, some gender warriors include Sarah Kemble Knight, Sara Willis Parton, and Louisa May Alcott (148). More significant, perhaps, are those we might describe as gender subversives – individuals who troubled, appropriated, stretched, and otherwise challenged gender scripts, anticipating the insights of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir who would posit a century later that “‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’” (Butler 35). In Toward A Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism, the gender subversive Margaret Fuller is quoted as saying that “male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism…There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine women” (Elbert 229). Like Beauvoir, Fuller recognized gender as the fluctuating cultural enactment of sex, absent the fixedness and stability of essential identity. In Female Husbands: A Trans History, Jen Manion uncovers the stories of “female husbands” who, from 1746 onward, decided to transition from the female gender assigned at birth to carry out their lives as men in the US and the UK. This history offers a potentially important context for interpreting Howe’s masculinization as Department Chair at the New Orleans Exposition.

Scholars typically place Howe among the gender warriors, based on her early career. Gayle Ann Gullet, for example, asserts that “the life story of Mrs. Howe was the story of a woman, compelled by her sense of glorious mission, who achieved greatness by striking down the barriers of custom and prejudice that held all women in bondage” (2). Gullet goes so far as to declare that “Mrs. Howe redefined women’s nature” (2), but she also makes it clear that this redefinition was limited in scope, since it meant situating women as “equal, although different from, men, except in the one area of morality where women were superior” (iii). For many critics, Howe’s warrior ways were particularly apparent in her determination to be a published writer. Gary Williams notes that Howe’s first publication, a review of Lamartine’s long narrative poem Jocelyn, “was distinctly not the kind of thing her culture expected a seventeen-year-old female to produce,” exhibiting the sort of detached authority traditionally associated with the voice of a masculine literary critic (xviii). The mere fact of Howe placing pen to paper was radical for the time, as “very few women of Julia Ward’s age, class, and marital status considered writing to be an appropriate activity” or compatible with womanly duties in the domestic sphere (xiv). Howe would come closest to being a gender subversive in her penning of The Hermaphrodite, a text that focuses on the plasticity of both gender and sex. Laurence, the primary character of the novel, possesses both male and female anatomical characteristics and is raised as a man by his parents to provide him the prerogative to “choose [his] own terms in associating with the world, and secure to [him] an independence of position most desirable for one who could never hope to become the half of another” (3). According to Williams, Howe – who was likewise regarded as someone whose very “being fused culturally ascribed impulses of both genders” (xvii) – used The Hermaphrodite as an opportunity for engaging in “a contemplation of her own psychological androgyny” (xxvii). Writing the novel allowed her to “occupy a speculative region otherwise inaccessible to her historical moment, especially to American women” (xxxvii).

As close as Howe may have come to subverting gender ideology in her writing, however, her leadership of the Women’s Department at the New Orleans Exposition in 1884 stopped short of such possibilities. In her account of the New Orleans Women’s Department, historian Miki Pfeffer places Howe firmly in the company of gender warriors who sought to expand, but not question, women’s roles. She argues that for Howe “work was the gospel of womanhood” and the reformer was ecstatic that the New Orleans exhibit allowed that, for the first time in history, women would provide full proof of their progression and ability as a sex (37). Pfeffer also suggests that Howe was aware of the masculinizing terms applied to her by exposition leaders, and appropriated this rhetoric in her own language, motivating women to “rally like soldiers to their standard, to touch shoulders like soldiers marching into battle” (37). Elsewhere, however, Howe’s speeches and leadership adhered closely to conservative formulations of middle-class white femininity. At the opening of the Women’s Department she reaffirmed her belief in women’s moral superiority: “I have spoken of women as guardians of the peace of the household. Let me also say, that they are to be the guardians of the peace of the world” (Howe 14). She also emphasized that the preponderance of work on exhibit had “for its object the comfort and adornment of the household” (Howe 14). Here, Howe affirms women’s status as moral guardians of the world and ensures that their work does not threaten the status of men’s work.

It is important to note that the physical space of the Women’s Department itself contributed to the production of gendered spheres. Expositions were always structured by the power dynamics around national, regional, racial, class, and gender identities, and, in Pfeffer’s words, the latter was “built into the design, rhetoric, patterns, and themes” (Pfeffer 159-60). The simple idea of a distinct, dedicated site for showcasing “women’s work” unavoidably invited a gendered appraisal of the exhibits (Pfeffer 159-60). Katherine Adams shows that the Women’s Department was represented in terms that resembled “‘a domestic retreat,’” with its exhibit described as “‘parlors’ and its literary alcove as a ‘quiet and peaceful place of repose’” (Adams 30). We should also consider that Howe’s speeches and writing about the Women’s Department could reflect some defensiveness on her part, given the male anxiety that her public and Howe’s intellectual ambitions had inspired in her father and husband. Williams posits that “some of this anxiety Julia clearly internalized” (Williams xxvii). Perhaps she thought that the only way to introduce an often-hostile world to women’s widening access to work was in a palatable, familiar guise that did not threaten men’s work or too-acutely challenge nineteenth-century conceptions of gender. Perhaps Howe’s Opening Day speech was, in part, an act of self-fashioning that resulted from her own anxieties about her previous departures from traditional femininity.

Works Cited

Adams, Katherine. “Becoming Global: Gender, Race, and Cognitive Mapping at the 1884 World’s Fair.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020.

Argersinger, Jana L., and Phyllis Cole. Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism. The University of Georgia Press, 2014. 

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015. 

Gullet, Gayle Ann. “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Definition of Woman by Julia Ward Howe.” Loma Linda University, 1973. 

Howe, Julia Ward, and Gary Williams. Hermaphrodite (Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers). University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 

Laffrado, Laura. Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing. Ohio State University Press, 2009. 

Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 

New Orleans, 1884, Report and Catalogue of The Woman’s Department of The World’s Exposition, Held at New Orleans.

Pfeffer, Miki. Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair. University Press of Mississippi, 2015. 

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 1966, p. 151.