Lady Devils

In Devil in the White City, Erik Larson tells the true story of the events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.  He parallels the creation of the fair with the rise of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer. I am about a third of the way through the text, and it is well-written, male-oriented, and fascinating.  

I came upon a passage yesterday detailing the construction of the Women’s Building, the only structure of the fair entrusted to a female architect. Young Sophia Hayden won a contest for her blueprint and was allowed to design the building, but she was under the supervision of Bertha Honore Palmer, a wealthy socialite who served as head of the “Board of Lady Managers, which governed all things at the fair having to do with women” (142).  The following ensued:

In September, without Hayden’s knowledge, Palmer had invited women everywhere to donate architectural ornaments for the building and in response had received a museum’s worth of columns, panels, sculpted figures, window grills, doors, and other objects.  Palmer believed the building could accommodate all the contributions, especially those sent by prominent women. Hayden, on the other hand, knew that such a hodgepodge of materials would result in an aesthetic abomination. […]
Despite Mrs. Palmer’s blinding social glare, Hayden continued to decline donations.  A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.  Mrs. Palmer pecked and pestered and catapulted icy smiles into Hayden’s deepening gloom. Finally Palmer assigned the decoration of the Woman’s Building to someone else, a designer named Candace Wheeler.
Hayden fought the arrangement in her quiet, stubborn way until she could take it no longer.  She walked into Burnham’s [the lead architect] office, began to tell him her story, and promptly, literally, went mad: tears, heaving sobs, cries of anguish, all of it.  “A severe breakdown,” an acquaintance called it, “with a violent attack of high nervous excitement of the brain.”
Burnham, stunned, summoned one of the exposition surgeons.  Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest.  She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression. (142-3)

H.H. Holmes set his sight on his victims, killed them quietly, then dissected them according to his pleasure.  The brand of torture described here, though, is one of which only women are capable. At least in my experience.  The “snubs and poisonous courtesy”, the “icy smiles”, the pecking and pestering...these are female specialties, I am sorry to say.  And I am not excluding myself from them. We have all been part of this particularly feminine warfare to some degree. And social media has made giving the “blinding social glare” so much easier; we can hide behind a screen and pick apart our victim while she is still alive and writhing.    

Why do we do this to one another? The ladies here have already been segregated into a group for “things having to do with women”, and instead of making their corner shine, they compromise it and tear each other down.  Let’s use our power for good, ladies. And keep the devil out of the details.