Wonder Women

In the history of World Expos there have been three official women’s pavilions before Expo 2025. The first was at the1876 Expo in Philadelphia, when Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, the great-granddaughter of Ben Franklin, helped build a pavilion with money raised from “Martha Washington tea parties,” where women in colonial dress sold 25 cent teacups commemorating the Boston Tea Party. The second was at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with a women’s building designed by MIT graduate Sophia Hayden, one of the few female architects in the country. The third was at Expo 2020 in Dubai. There Cartier sponsored the pavilion whose elegant mashrabiya-inspired lattice work was based on a woman’s vintage bracelet by the famed jeweler.

But why do we even need a women’s pavilion?

One a look at a popular cartoon explains it. Right before the Pan-American Exposition opened in Buffalo, NY in 1901, a cartoon in Puck magazine showed Uncle Sam and John Bull, the alpha-male personification of their countries, escorting a group of world leaders through “a chamber of female horrors” at the upcoming fair.

The domestic demons were movers and shakers of women’s suffrage, like Carrie Chapman Catt, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Others of the dreaded gender were Dr. Mary Walker, the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army as well as generic evangelical and temperance figures. The men in entourage look alarmed at this “monstrous regiment of women.”

Keep this in mind when you tour the women’s pavilion in Osaka—again sponsored by Cartier —and to appreciate how far we’ve come and the way World Expos helped us get there.