Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Bertha Honoré Palmer, on May 22, 1849, in Louisville, Kentucky. As President of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World’s Fair, she made lasting impact on the shape of the Columbian Exposition, especially with regard to raising the profile of women’s contributions to society.
Here is an excerpt from her Dedication Day address, presented on October 21, 1892, in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building to a crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand:
Of all the changes which have resulted from the great ingenuity and inventiveness of the race, there is none that equals in importance to woman the application of machinery to the performance of the never-ending tasks that have previously been hers. The removal from the household to the various factories, where such work is now done, of spinning, carding, dyeing, knitting, the weaving of textile fabrics, sewing, the cutting and making of garments, and many other laborious occupations, has enabled her to lift her eyes from the drudgery that has oppressed her since pre-historic days.
The result is that women as a sex have been liberated. They now have time to think, to be educated, to plan and pursue careers of their own choosing. Consider the value to the race of one-half of its members being enabled to throw aside the intolerable bondage of ignorance that has always weighed them down! See the innumerable technical, professional and art schools, academies and colleges that have been suddenly called into existence by the unwonted demand! It is only about one hundred years since girls were first permitted to attend the free schools of Boston. They were then allowed to take the places of boys, for whom the schools were instituted, during the season when the latter were helping to gather in the harvest.
It is not strange that woman is drinking deeply of the long-denied fountain of knowledge. She had been told, until she almost believed it, by her physician, that she was of too delicate and nervous an organization to endure the application and mental strain of the school-room; by the scientist that the quality of the gray matter of her brain would not enable her to grasp the exact sciences, and that its peculiar convolutions made it impossible for her to follow a logical proposition from premise to conclusion; by her anxious parents that there was nothing that a man so abominated as a learned woman, nothing so unlovely as a blue stocking; and yet she comes, smiling from her curriculum, with her honors fresh upon her, healthy and wise, forcing us to acknowledge that she is more than ever attractive, companionable and useful.
