When conceptualizing the importance of the Woman’s Building, it is essential to consider the contextual environs of society at the time. The Woman’s building and its contribution to art, literature, and architecture were pivotal not only for women but each category respectively. In its curation, the Woman’s Building avouched the conception of the nineteenth-century female gaze in resisting and reforming the male gaze. Since previous to the Fair’s building, women had never curated or collectively made public art and artistic spaces, the exhibition space created a precedent for female art. The space reflected how artists constructed femininity, reflecting the volatility of gender relations in Gilded-era Chicago. The Columbian Exposition refracted the socio-cultural movements of Gilded Age America. One of the largest facets of this era was the reformation of women’s role and place in modern society and a general push against domesticity. This was an unprecedented movement in both the civic and artistic realms, as the commissioners and the commissioned, were women. 

In this Essay, I will discuss how the Exposition ultimately reflected three interrelated narratives: evolutionary progression, the emancipatory freedoms of modern democracies, and the triumph of modernity. I will be relating how these themes exhibited throughout the fair were taken and feminized by the women in charge of the Woman’s Building. In terms of evolutionary progression, this narrative expands to a broader, more intersectional narrative of race, culture, and gender. I also touch on the nineteenth century adhesion to Darwinist evolutionary theory and the application of this theory to demonstrate the progression of civilized society. In general, this narrative of historical progression was threaded throughout the Fairground, attempting to configure a cohesive world history by using differentiated exhibit spaces.

The triumph of modernity places American innovation at the forefront, as the exposition used concepts and iconography of colonial America to emphasize the triumph of the modern era. Overall, it looked into how far America had come as a society and a celebration of modernity equally. With the adoption of evolutionary theory, there was an emphasis on the hierarchy of the present, a celebration of the current era. The Exposition offered a forum for collective discussion on the political and social climate of the nation and Chicago. It allowed for global art, ideas, thoughts, iconography, and literature to be shared in one particular forum. This ties into the emancipatory freedoms of modern democracies, as the fair, occurred in post-civil-war America. As African-Americans gained more emancipatory freedoms, this common theme of newfound freedom and American democracy was threaded throughout the Exposition. 

I will also discuss how the Woman’s Building took the themes, rhetoric, and iconography of the Columbian Exposition and principally feminized them. However incongruous these themes are to modern political jargon and belief, the Woman’s Building must be accredited for its female civic ascendancy. Within the nineteenth-century framework, women remarkably challenged their differentiated role within society. The curators of the building took anomalous leadership in creating a female space. Women were able to broaden their vocational horizons not only through artistry but through leadership and representation; However unvariegated the representation was, the building placed women in the history of the fair, the city, and the era. 

In feminizing the mainly male-determained narratives and iconography within the Fairgrounds, the building placed women at the center of a singularly determined space. The building also offers an understanding of how visual images and rhetoric contributed to the women's emancipation movement towards the end of the 19th century.