2. It’s A Man’s World
The World’s Fair is as gendered as any American enterprise at the time, casting women in either seductive or domestic roles—and especially as targets for consumer goods that promised to modernize and improve their domestic tasks.
The Fair’s images of men portray leadership, enterprise, success, power, and masculinity. Masculine might and desire were signaled throughout the Fair, including marketing to boys, the men’s market of tomorrow.
“The Man Building” (clearly not meant to represent the loftier ‘mankind’) was sponsored by the Men’s Apparel Quality Guild.
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(above) American Boys Future Presidents League Youth group with ‘Citizens of Tomorrow for the World of Tomorrow’ banner. Apparently that ‘tomorrow’ excludes the female species altogether.
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(above) Fair Chairman Gibson dispenses advice to a possible 1976 presidential candidate, 13-yr old Matthew Seely.
A Woman’s Place...
Meanwhile, representations of women at the Fair—when not posed as product models, assemblers of featured innovations, or as domestics in the model kitchen or home—came from the worlds of burlesque, synchronized pageantry, or beauty contests. The Amusement Zone featured all-but-nude women characterized as Female Sun Worshippers.
With its origins, in part, in eugenics, ‘sun worship’ was a practice of racial superiority through robust health:
In 1939, the New York World’s fair hosted a display by the NTG Sun Worshippers. It was part of Broadway producer Nils T. Granlund’s Congress of Beauty exhibit. Granlund was the publicist for Marcus Loew who formed Loews Theatres and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). After running a number of girlie shows at New York’s Mont Carlo and El Fey clubs, operating the vast mob-owned Hollywood, a dinner-and-show club on Times Square, and opening The Midnight Sun night club—running in six different clubs run by six different gangsters—Granlund created the “CONGRESS OF BEAUTY” and “SUN-WORSHIPPERS COLONY”. ...It tapped into the fashion for light therapies, as espoused by the wonderful Madame Alwyn, esteemed medics, Nazi Ubermensch Gertrud Scholtz-Klink and British toff Prunella Stack, called ‘Britain’s Perfect Girl.’ She visited Scholz-Klink in Germany in the summer of 1938 after the Women’s League of Health and Beauty had been invited to participate that summer in a Physical Education Congress sponsored by Kraft durch Freude. (It was reported in the British press that at one point she gave a Nazi salute.)
—from Nils T. Granlund And His Colony Of Naked Sun Worshippers Star At New York’s World Fair, 1939, flashbak.com)
Jack Sheridan’s “Living Magazine Covers” amusement posed willing women visitors, framed by an oversized graphic magazine motif, to be photographed in glamorous or suggestive poses.
A tug-of-war served both as burlesque attraction and advertisement for the revolutionary durability of nylon stockings newly introduced at the Fair. (Background bathing beauties contrast the clownish female figure in the foreground.)
Women pose in theme sweaters as boxers, and with a sports promoter, Christy Walsh; Aquacade performers frolick in fountains in view of Perisphere and Trylon, official theme of the 1939–40 Worlds Fair.
Public relations men and event organizers cast women largely as sideshow attraction. Leo Casey, Director of Public Relations for the Fair writes: The monkeys just can’t stay away from the Aquacade. Some half dozen of the elusve simians have taken refuge in the warmth of Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the New York World’s Fair. Jungle-Master Frank Buck, from whom the monkeys escaped, set traps in the Aquacade, and were captured. One is shown here with the Aquagals.
Women ‘workers’ testing and packaging latex gloves at the Firestone exhibit; model secretarial stations in the Town of Tomorrow exhibit; women ‘judges’ at a Doughnut contest; two models lunch in the ‘World of Models’ fashion area.
Women were employed in large numbers to staff the Fair, many returning for reemployment in the 1940 extension of the Fair. The uniform fitting resembles that of troops showing up for military duty.
Not all women at the Fair posed in display or acted as performers. Women in leadership—most of them married to powerful men in society, industry, politics or the military— convened to help plan the fair and organize events and programming. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt appeared to give speeches; there were pageants, parades, special celebratory days, and other displays of international custom and dress—all featuring women of constituencies as varied as the Overseas Service League and the Christian Temperence Union. While male Fair staffers were paid, the women were largely a volunteer work force.
(from left) Mrs. Oswald B. Lord, National Chairman of the New York World’s Fair National Advisory Committee. (Oswald B. Lord designed board games for Parker Brothers, including Game of Politics, 1935.)
Mrs. Lord views map of the Fair with other members of the New York World’s Fair National Advisory Committee.
Mrs. John Nicholas Brown of Rhode Island, Advisory Committee member. (Her collection of toy soldiers and military iconography comprises the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University.)
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to many different women’s groups at the Fair at such events as Rural Women’s Day.
On Sept. 16, 1940, French journalist Genevieve Tabouis spoke at The National Council of Women. From the Kirkus review of her autobiography, They Called Me Cassandra: This is the autobiography of France’s foremost newspaper correspondent, whose influence has been more far reaching than that of Lazareff, whose Deadline is on Random House list. She had access to all the great men and events of the past twenty years, in France and other foreign capitals. With deceptive fragility of demeanour, she called the Axis shots before they fell, time and again presaging the surrender of the democracies. She struck out at Hitler and was denounced by him. This traces her career from reporter at the League to Foreign Editor of L’Oeuvre, hers is a career unequalled by any other woman journalist. Through years of intricate party and power politics, she came in contact with Briand, Stresemann, Laval, Bruening, Blum, Litvinov, Von Papen, Weygand, Gayda, Bonnet and others.
Women’s Benefit Association Day: women in costume kneeling in the Court of Peace.
Women’s Benefit Association Day: parade of women in Grecian gowns
Japan and Poland participated in the Fair, despite the escalating war conflict effects at home. (Germany declined participation in the World’s Fair after protracted arguments with New York’s Mayor LaGuardia.)