Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge by Kate Hill (review)

Kate Hill’s Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge, part of Manchester University Press’s Gender in History series, is not only a masterful work of historical scholarship and careful theoretical, historiographical, and methodological intervention, but also a bracingly relevant and important book. In her sophisticated and nuanced treatment of gender and museums (including all kinds of collections, in all kinds of institutional settings), Hill makes a remarkable contribution that deserves to be read by all those interested in Victorian history and gender, as well as those specifically studying museums and collections. Crucially, her work also helps us think about the interactions between gender, power, and knowledge production in our own day. By taking an explicitly non-essentialist approach to both women and museums, Hill opens up ways of thinking about categories like public and private, male and female, and amateur and professional in entirely new, “hybrid,” “fluid,” and “ambiguous” ways (109, 23, 7). Indeed, if the idea of transgender and queer sexual identities and sexualities has opened up our political discourse to (and provoked fights over) gender as a culturally constructed spectrum, Hill draws on and puts into action new ways of approaching gender as a category for analyzing her finely crafted archival research. As in her other works, her writing and thinking are refreshingly clear, and she brings her reader through her argument via well-chosen primary-source evidence. Her finely grained (and against the grain) research yields glimpses of these nineteenth-century women in archives that are often otherwise silent or opaque. Her skepticism about the power of essentialist categories or of museums to entirely shape meaning produces subtle and multilayered interpretations; for Hill, things are often both/and, not either/or. Rather than creating cognitive dissonance, Hill instead gives us a model for breaking out of stale binaries and avoiding lazy rhetorical reinstatements of essentialist categories. She shows us, and helps us understand, the complexities of lived experience.

Women and Museums covers seven chapters, organized around Hill’s approach to the operation of gender in museums—and therefore women’s involvement in them—through the concept of the “distributed museum,” which she adapts from the work of Chris Gosden and Frances Larson on the Pitt-Rivers Museum (5). Such an approach analyzes museums as the expression of overlapping social networks, including the local context as well as collectors, donors, and the discursive formation of such institutions through the periodical press and contemporary writers, art critics, scientists, and other specialists. This vision of museums highlights the way in which the idea of institutions as objects with defined boundaries, and the embodiment of that idea in museums’ architectural expressions, has hidden the many overlapping and fluid relationships that combine to establish and maintain them. At the same time, as Hill shows, tracing women’s involvement in museums helps us understand more clearly how, and to what extent, museums broke down clear boundaries between public and private. Her chapters thus follow women who served as curators (rare) or as (more frequent) volunteers or assistants (chapter 1), as well as donors (chapters 2 and 3), visitors (chapter 4), and patrons (chapter 5). All of these roles, as she points out, were both inside and outside of museums in complex ways. Her final two chapters consider women in relation to museums as places that created meaning and structured knowledge, by considering women in museums relating to the new fields of archaeology and anthropology (chapter 6) and in museums arising from schemes connecting aesthetics and morality derived from the ideas of John Ruskin (chapter 7).

Through all seven chapters, supported through detailed archival work and careful analysis, Hill convincingly argues that women and museums made each other: perhaps because of their very liminality and inchoate nature in this period, museums became important vehicles for women to work through and transform the limits of the possible, even while such...