Without Touching Upon Suffrage: Gender and Economic Citizenship at the World's Columbian Exposition

The era between the Supreme Court's (1875) Minor decision and the (1920) Anthony Amendment was marked by productive uncertainty about women's citizenship status: they were citizens without the right to vote. This essay suggests that a handful of women seized upon the World's Columbian Exposition to promote economic citizenship as an alternative for women. They promoted women's economic participation in the fair's dominant discourses of science and religion, and they rendered it a practice of citizenship in the language of republicanism and liberalism.