Women and museums 1850–1914

Modernity and the gendering of knowledge

Kate Hill

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526113412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book recovers the significant contribution made by women to museums, not just in obvious roles such as workers, but also as donors, visitors, volunteers and patrons. It suggests that women persistently acted to domesticate the museum, by importing domestic objects and domestic regimes of value, as well as by making museums more welcoming to children, and even by stressing the importance of housekeeping at the museum. At the same time, women sought 'masculine' careers in science and curatorship, but found such aspirations hard to achieve; their contribution tended to be kept within clear, feminised areas. The book will be of interest to those working on gender, culture, or museums in the period. It sheds new light on women's material culture and material strategies, education and professional careers, and leisure practices. It will form an important historical context for those working in contemporary museum studies.

1

Inside the museum: including or excluding women?

An examination of women working in museums between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War indicates that they were under-qualified, and regarded as unprofessional, but superlatively cheap or free labour, which in the cash-strapped world of smaller museums especially was a strong advantage.¹ They were recognised as good at tasks such as boring, mundane work, fine work with their hands, and traditionally female tasks involving cleaning, children and communication, especially with other women or the working classes, but were not seen as suitable for curatorial roles because of the leadership, research and commitment such positions required. It is not, therefore, that museums should be seen as either including or excluding women, as has sometimes been suggested; rather, we need to look at how their inclusion was managed, contained and negotiated by a range of actors in varying settings. There were, as I will show, surprising numbers of women working in museums during our period. However, uncovering their contribution is less easy than men’s. Men’s patterns of work and criteria of career success have structured the way in which women’s work has been researched, leading to the persistent idea that women were invisible and inaudible in museums.² The norms of male career patterns and definitions of success have obscured the significant numbers of women working in museums, but if we pay attention instead to the distinctive strategies of women, we can see and hear them much more clearly, and can think about what they did, as well as what they did not do.³

Although museums were distributed organisations where a wide range of people and things formed networks of meaning production in a variety of locations, there is no doubt that the physical institution of the museum occupied a privileged position in these networks, and that curators tried hard to centralise the museum. Decision making power was increasingly, though never exclusively, vested in those with curatorial positions, over and above even those with financial power, such as local authority committees, universities, or major donors. Moreover, formal institutional roles were not amenable to informal access in the way that other aspects of the museum were, and therefore there were more often explicit barriers to women’s involvement. While women were to figure relatively easily as donors and visitors to museums, as we shall see, they struggled more to access those roles which might be seen as most central to the museum as institution: paid curatorial work. Museums were the site of a determined, if not entirely successful, attempt at masculine professionalisation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which built on earlier ideas about curation as a ‘gentlemanly’ occupation, and meant that while women could gain employment in museums, they could rarely become full curators.

Museum expansion, especially outside London, was driven by natural history in the nineteenth century, and also tended to enshrine a small number of men in paid or honorary positions with a great deal of authority over their museums.⁴ However, museums underwent a fairly rapid development in their contents, organisational structure and personnel during the period, especially between 1870 and 1914, which changed the dynamics of the internal community of the museum in significant ways. It is important to recognise, however, that this development was not always linear and ‘progressive’, and its results did not necessarily impact on the roles of men and women in ways that might be predicted. As a result, this chapter argues that despite sometimes overt attempts to exclude women from museums, the institutions came to represent important opportunities for women to develop careers, and to influence the overall direction of development, which were not always present in other areas of intellectual work.

The development of museums was part of a trend towards a more professional career structure within science and culture which was particularly noticeable during the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵ It has been noted that part of the process of professionalisation in the natural sciences was an attempt to purge women from the field, because the feminine had come to be associated with amateurism, frivolity and a tendency to replicate existing knowledge rather than to innovate.⁶ Professionalisation, in other words, required the explicit exclusion of those who might damage the authority, as well as the earning power, of the emerging professional group.⁷ Curators were a group who developed the apparatus of a profession later than some other groups, but nevertheless by 1914 had a professional body, and some elements of training were beginning to develop, so the effects of this professionalisation on women’s opportunities in museums need to be examined.⁸

The development of the museum institution and profession cannot, however, be characterised simply as increasingly exclusionary. In the first place, this was because the process of professionalisation was so piecemeal and slow, and amateurs of various kinds continued to play an important part in museums throughout the entire period. Secondly, the expansion of the museum and the developments in science and knowledge production generally meant that there were a large number of new roles created, often supporting male professionals, which offered new opportunities to women. Thirdly, women were developing their own areas of gendered professional expertise which they could introduce into museums, such as educational activities and what might be termed, anachronistically, ‘outreach’, which male professionals were happy to leave to them.⁹ This all meant that museums were, relatively speaking, a much more open field for women than areas such as laboratory work; they shared more characteristics with libraries, which rapidly feminised in the early twentieth century.¹⁰ It should be noted, though, that in libraries, as in museums, women mostly worked as junior assistants on low wages and disproportionately did not have professional qualifications.¹¹

By the point at which public museums were starting to expand in the second half of the nineteenth century, women had already colonised and become identified with the popular communication of science. Children’s interest in natural history collecting was inculcated largely through books written by middle-class women introducing the techniques of collecting and preserving, the skills of close observation, and the basics of classification and Latin nomenclature. The view emerged, therefore, of feminine natural history expertise, and arguably of feminine knowledge in general, as associated with child rearing, domestically based, essentially ‘hobbyist’ in nature, centred on what we might call ‘transferable skills’ of observation, perseverance and self-discipline, and above all suited to popular communication.¹² While this could restrict the way women engaged with natural history, it also offered substantial opportunities in what has been characterised as a ‘woman-centred scientific pedagogy’ and could give women a platform to demonstrate new skills and competences.¹³ Indeed, Lightman argues that women used illustration to highlight their detailed observation and accurate reproduction of specimens, which were widely acknowledged to be female strengths, but also increasingly to demonstrate their facility with advanced scientific equipment such as powerful microscopes, in order to bolster their own authority in the light of male assertions of the limitations of women naturalists.¹⁴ Feminine gendering of natural history opened up opportunities for women as authors, illustrators, and mediators, and this was an important precedent for certain roles within museums which women went on to develop.

Museums, museum work and the Museums Association

Museum work developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to include many different and new areas; it encompassed both ‘hard’ research science, field collecting, educational work, and increasingly complex collections management and conservation, and is thus potentially of enormous importance in understanding the ways in which women’s employment changed during this period.¹⁵ Moreover, museums varied in size, aims and constituency, from small, poorly funded local museums aiming to cover a wide subject range, to large, prestigious national museums and increasingly specialised university museums.¹⁶ This goes some way to explain the different roles which women occupied; most significantly because the process of professionalisation reached different stages at different museums.

Jordanna Bailkin identifies the drive among curators to enhance their status, authority and remuneration by creating and enforcing professional standards and particular educational and training pathways as a key factor affecting attitudes towards women in museums.¹⁷ It is certainly the case that the formation of the Museums Association (MA) in Britain reflected concern among curators about their professional status and salary levels in the field, leading to fears that poorly educated women workers could potentially undo any gains curators were making. Equally, though, the MA enshrined the contribution of amateurs with an early president, the Reverend Henry Higgins, who had worked on a voluntary basis at Liverpool Museums for some years, and amateurs continued to be part of the MA for some time.¹⁸ Women were not absent from the MA in its early years but their contribution centred on ‘feminine’ museum practices, especially in children’s education. They remained, however, somewhat marginal figures in comparison with the American Association of Museums (AAM), where women’s emphasis on education and children brought them a more central role.¹⁹

The MA, of course, was dedicated to improving the professional career prospects of men. However, concepts derived from men’s work patterns might not be applicable to women’s.²⁰ The idea of a career path, a linear progression through time culminating in a series of ever more senior paid professional positions, is, I suggest, not helpful for thinking about women’s work at this time. Women moved in and out of paid and unpaid employment in complex ways, and did not always measure success in terms of the achievement of a salaried position. Women might, for example, obtain a paid museum position, but then resign it upon marriage, and instead become a volunteer at the same museum. This stemmed from the external constraints upon women, and their creative responses to those constraints. Opportunities varied depending on class, expertise and marital status, among many factors; and they changed over a woman’s life cycle. Moreover, this means that for women, professionalisation and amateur interventions were not always seen as in opposition: some women valued the position of amateur in its own right, while for others it might be a route into a professional position, or a way to continue working in museums after a paid position had been relinquished.²¹

A typology of women in muse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Inside the museum: including or excluding women?
• 2 Outside the museum: women as donors and vendors
• 3 Outside the museum: women’s donations, materiality and the museum object
• 4 Women visiting museums
• 5 Women as patrons: the limits of agency?
• 6 New disciplines: archaeology, anthropology and women in museums
• 7 Ruskin, women and museums: service and salvage
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index