Ideas versus things: the balancing act of interpreting historic house museums

Abstract

This article explores the balancing act required between ideas and things when creating interpretive plans for historic house museums. While these sites are important features of the American museum landscape, they have tended to uncritically focus on domestic objects and thus reify antiquated ideas regarding gender roles and the home. My archaeological work at a museum‐in‐the‐making, the Matilda Joslyn Gage House, has uncovered a rich array of domestic artefacts. The museum, however, plans to emphasise Gage’s ideas – her leadership in radical reform movements – which begs the question of how archaeology can contribute. I argue that explicit discussion of the meanings given to material culture through their use is the key. Showing how everyday materials, like tea wares, were an integral part of Gage’s radical reform work upends traditional beliefs regarding the place of home and women in society, and furthers the museum’s goal of highlighting the significance of Gage’s work.

Keywords:

• historic house museums
• gender
• domesticity
• reform movements
• tea wares

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. I would like to thank Christina Hodge and Christa Beranek for their work in creating this journal issue, and Teresa Dujnic, Laurie Wilkie, and Maureen Trudelle Schwarz for helpful comments on this article. As always, I am indebted to the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, Inc., Executive Director Sally Roesch Wagner, and Beth Crawford of Crawford and Stearns Preservation Planners for their longstanding support of this project and willingness to share research findings.

Notes

1. Gage’s magnum opus, Woman, Church and State, was published in 1893 and exhaustively detailed her case against organised religion in creating and maintaining the subordination of women. While some readers embraced the book, it was also the subject of heated opposition and attracted the attention of Anthony Comstock, enforcer of obscenity laws. Publication of the book served to further estrange Gage’s relations with the NAWSA.

2. As West (1994) discusses how Orchard House was presented to the public during the first half of the twentieth century, please note that this is not a negative comment on their current interpretive strategies. For information on the site currently, see their website at http://www.louisamayalcott.org.

3. As of my visit to the Tenement Museum on 15 September 2009, the Kitchen Conversations programme was no longer available, replaced by a ‘Super Tour’ which combined a walking tour of the neighbourhood with one of the standard tours of the tenement building. More information on the museum’s tours and programmes can be accessed at their website: http://www.tenement.org.

4. Practice theory approaches, derived from the work of Bourdieu (1977), Giddens (1979), and de Certeau (1984); have been fruitfully applied in archaeological contexts from various places and time periods. Just a few examples include Silliman (2001) and Lightfoot et al.’s (1998) use of practice theory in colonial California, and Gillespie (2000) and Hendon’s (2004) use of it in Mesoamerica. Still other archaeologists, for example Clark and Wilkie (2006) and Joyce (2000), have further incorporated Judith Butler’s (1990, 2004) concept of performativity into considerations of practice and the construction of personhood.