Having served as juror in group 18 of the Department of Liberal Arts at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, it gives me great pleasure to make for you the best report I can on woman’s work, my knowledge of most of which has been obtained from outside sources, as by neither registration nor cataloguing was there any differentiation between the work of man and woman.

There were two very large relief maps of New Orleans and the levee system of the Mississippi River, which were the work of Miss Jennie Wilde, of New Orleans, and, while they rank low in the final prize award, attracted a great deal of attention and admiration.  Comparatively speaking, I think this work much more ambitious than that heretofore undertaken by a woman along this line, and should prove a stimulus to woman in a new field.  I could not see that results would have been better if their work had been separately exhibited.

So far as I know, manufacturers were not then asked to state the percentage of woman’s work which entered into their special exhibits; nor were they, as a rule, shown in such manner as to indicate in any way which part was performed by woman and which by man.  The grand prize work, I am informed by the Rand, McNally Company, was nearly half performed by women; certainly 45 per cent of it.  In this the skill and ingenuity displayed and the originality was not separable from that of her colaborers.

Group 18, which consisted of geographical work in general, was hardly a fair test of woman’s skill, surveying and engineering having been considered out of her line.  Therefore I consider the one exhibit by woman a step forward along a new line, a willingness to compass great things, an evidence of woman’s ambition and desire to succeed, but with her past education and opportunities inadequate for equal competition.

If I may suggest, it will be greatly to our interest that women should have their work so catalogued that they may have credit for what labor they perform.  No doubt much work is done in map making by women, but no mention of it is catalogued or credit for its excellence asked by them.

It seems to me that a committee to investigate these questions at the beginning of each great exposition, or at the time of the placing of the exhibits, would be of very great statistical value in determining the amount of labor and the degree of skill exercised by woman in these departments.

The art of embroidery has been supposed always to be one peculiarly belonging to women, but that the men at least occasionally invade the field of her occupations is shown by the fact that the large Japanese and Chinese maps exhibited in the Transportation Building were both done by men, and showed exquisite workmanship, particularly the embroidered one.

The letter Miss Wilde herself has written in regard to the work on her relief map of the levee system may be of interest, as this certainly represents a new field of labor for women.  It counted one more gold medal in the awards.