In 1907, prominent Chicago reformers led by Ellen Henrotin and Jane Addams created an Industrial Exhibit showcasing a history of women in the workplace. Seeking to promote women’s entrance into modern, electricity-powered factories, the Exhibit’s organizers portrayed women’s labor progress in three stages: a stage of premodern, domestic-based craftwork; a stage of tenement-based, sweatshop labor; and a stage of modern, factory-based labor. The Exhibit became a site of controversy when workers demonstrating their labor objected to the Exhibit’s message that tenement sweatshops were old-fashioned and unclean by striking. Their strikes disrupted the Exhibit’s timeline of gendered progress and rearticulated the Exhibit as a site of current labor negotiations between workers, management, and the public. While affluent reformers and working women mutually sought labor reform, they used distinct and unequal rhetorical modes to communicate differing narratives about women’s work to the public.

This essay draws on letters, bulletins, photographs, and newspaper articles to give an account of the Hull House Settlement in Chicago in the 1890s and examines the rhetoric it engendered. The space of Hull House, I argue, communicated its founders’ Jane Addams’s and Ellen Gates Starr’s femininity, wealth, and knowledge of the wider world. Through an extended example of a garment workers’ labor meeting that took place in Hull House, I show how Hull House’s cosmopolitan aesthetic offered women and men from varying class, ethnic, and national backgrounds rhetorical resources for constructing ethos, and also provided constraints to communicating across differences.