From Washington to Paris and Back to Chicago: Building a Transatlantic Women's Network, 1888–93

This paper will focus on the very early years of the International Council of Women (ICW) and the beginnings of its efforts to foster a French national council.  The key player in this effort was May Wright Sewall, the ICW’s workhorse and acting president and a close collaborator with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.  Sewall organized the World’s Congress of Representative Women, held during the World Exposition in Chicago.  She encouraged her European contacts to send displays on the status of women in their respective countries, especially their education and employment to the Women’s Building.

French women active in social reform and with a developing feminist consciousness participated in the initial phases of developing the ICW (though their national council did not organize officially until 1901), and in this transatlantic collaboration for the Chicago congress of 1893. On the French side, the key players were Isabelle Bogelot, a protégé of the great French feminist Maria Deraismes, and head of the Oeuvre des Libérées de Saint-Lazare, who attended the Washington congress in 1888, became the first treasurer of the ICW, and also attended the Chicago Congress in 1893. Another key player in this developing network was Marie-Josephine Pégard who, as head of the “women’s committee,” orchestrated the development of the substantive French contribution to the Women’s Building in Chicago and engaged French officialdom in supporting this project. 

Among the sources I have found to date, including congress proceedings and obscure newspaper clippings (I am still searching for correspondence), I have succeeded in locating Mme Pegard’s commemorative volume, which consists of small, hand-painted color reproductions of the larger panels that were on display at the Exposition but were apparently lost or destroyed in the ensuing years.  My presentation will include a power-point display of a sampling of these extraordinary panels.