Theatricality and the Staging of Labour: The <i>Daily News</i> Sweated Industries’ Exhibition of 1906

The Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition took place in the Queens’ Hall, Regent Street, London in May 1906. In addition to publicising the appalling working conditions of women in ‘sweated’ employment, the organisers invited forty-five of those workers to perform their labour in the heart of London's West End. This essay explores the reception and impact of the Exhibition, and proposes that making a shift from a visual to a theatrical frame of interpretation reveals the full radical efficacy of this event. Through the staging of labour, the Exhibition revealed hidden relations of class, spectatorship and capital, and created conditions for sweated women workers to become increasingly visible in the public sphere—not as mere exhibitionary objects, but as political subjects in their own right.