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

Coedited by Dr. Sarah Wadsworth, professor of English, Marquette University, and Marija Dalbello, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University

Dr. Sarah Wadsworth

Long recognized as a cultural watershed and touchstone of modernity, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (World's Columbian Exposition) was the site of the first large-scale international library of writing by women. The result of years of planning and cooperation by women's organizations in 24 countries from North America, South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the library of the Woman's Building contained more than 8,000 volumes, with more than 3,000 from countries other than the United States. This book collects the work of feminist scholars specializing in different national traditions and transnational comparative analysis and focuses on the contributions of the international (non-U.S.) women's committees to extend our understanding of women's contribution to global print culture and the extension of women's rights up to 1893.

Learn more or purchase this book at Palgrave Macmillan

Dr. Wadsworth answered some questions about her new book, including where the idea for the book came from, her favorite part of the writing process and how the book complements her teaching and research.

How would you describe the book in one sentence?

A collection of essays that analyzes the contents of a multinational, multilingual library of works by women displayed at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, uncovering variations and interconnections among women's movements and literary contributions around the world.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

About 25 years ago, library historian Dr. Wayne A. Wiegand invited me to coauthor a book on the historic 8,000-volume library of women's texts gathered for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Since a substantial portion of the library was in languages other than English, it soon became clear that these subcollections would need to be examined in a separate book coauthored by a group of specialists in many different literatures and cultures. Wayne proposed this project to his former colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Marija Dalbello, now a professor in the School of Information and Communication at Rutgers University. A few years later, Marija and I began planning the book together, though we both needed to set it aside in order to complete other projects, and it wasn't until the summer of 2020 that we began to develop it in its current form.

Is this your first book? What is your publishing history?

This is my third book and first coedited collection. It is connected to my second book, "Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), co-authored by Wayne A. Wiegand, who is the link between Dalbello and me. My first book was "In the Company of Books: Literature and Its 'Classes' in Nineteenth-Century America" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), a study of the segmentation of the U.S. literary marketplace in the nineteenth century.

What was your favorite part of the writing/editing process?

My favorite part of the process was collaborating with my co-editor, Marija Dalbello, to bring together a diverse and distinguished group of scholars from many different disciplines, in many different countries, and at all stages of their careers. We came to the project from entirely different disciplines, with different strengths but overlapping interests and complementary networks in which to seek contributors. We began thinking together about this project near the start of our careers, and I don't think either of us could, or would, have completed it without the other. 

What do you hope to accomplish with this book?

One of our goals in developing this project was to bring together research on women's writing and women's organizing and activism around the world at this transitional moment on the verge of the 20th century to find out how they were different and how they were similar. With a dozen specialists from nearly as many disciplines - literatures and languages but also library and information studies and even data science and art history - analyzing the many discrete collections that made up the library as a whole, we hoped to make visible these similarities and differences and discover intersections in women's writing and organizing across national boundaries and cultural traditions. Now that it's published, we hope the volume will allow other scholars to continue to explore those intersections to further reveal the transnational dimension of women's rights activism extending back to the nineteenth century. We also hope it will serve as a model for collaborative research in the humanities building on digital and quantitative methods.

How does this book advance or complement your research and/or teaching?

Like my other two books, "Global Voices" contributes to the interdisciplinary field of the history of the book, which includes the history of authorship, reading, publishing, and the materiality and circulation of texts. All three of these books have a significant emphasis on gender as well.

All of the courses I teach incorporate book history and gender to some degree, whether as a central topic in graduate seminars focused on the 19th century, such as "Writing in the 1850s" and "Periodicals and Print Culture," or as a significant component of undergraduate courses, such as "Children's Literature," "Moby-Dick" and "Women Writers."

If you have recently published a book, or if you have one coming out, we would like to feature your publication in an upcoming Marquette Bookshelf feature.More information on the submission process is available online.

Book Details

• Publisher: ‎ Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2023 edition (Feb. 7, 2024)
• Language: ‎ English
• Hardcover: ‎ 284 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 3031424891
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-3031424892

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