No "Women's Department"

St. Louis Ladies Feel Their Equality
With Men So Keenly They Desire
No Distinction Made

The Buffalo Evening News, January 18, 1901
Reprinted from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat

The women of St. Louis, that is, that limited number of them to whom it is tacitly delegated the right to speak for the sex, known as club women, have placed themselves on record as opposed to any "women's department" or "women's building" at the St. Louis World's Fair. Here if the first point of differentiation between the Chicago and St. Louis fairs. With equality before the law and equality in the store and in the workshop, and most assuredly most perfect equality in the street car, woman is determined to have equality before the judges of the exhibits at the World's Fair. In the products of brain and hand she scorns any collection of shawls, feather flowers and beaded pincushions, such as adorned and mussed up a vast building at Chicago named after her, and has determined for a fair fight and no favor in every one of the plaster of paris palaces at St. Louis where the result of human industry is to be exhibited. This is broad ground to take, and ought to inspire all mankind with a proper conception of the advance that women are making throughout the world. There isn't any doubt that, given the same chance and equal privileges with the men, woman's work will match that of men. Even in the field of invention wherever it is possible to give women training in mechanics, they have shown equal aptitude, notwithstanding a deeply lodged disbelief in regard to their proficiency with a nail and a hammer. It was a woman who invented the ice cream freezer, and the continued inventiveness of her mind along this line is seen in her clever and successful contrivances to induce obtuse or parsimonious mankind to buy for her her rightful share of the confection which her own brain conferred upon this earth among its other blessings. Everywhere we see the delicacy of women's thought and touch in art, science and business. There is no danger that it will be buried among the contributors of the men to the exposition. It will reveal itself everywhere, so that he who runs may read.

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