Ignored Stories, Missed Opportunities: Women's Representation in Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century Historic House Museums

Abstract

Women are frequently under-represented at historic house museums. By quantitatively measuring how we talk about women during house tours, public historians can utilize this information to re-tool the stories they tell about women to create a more complex and individualized narrative. Using Shrum’s Gender Matrix, I analyzed the representation of women in historic house museums in Ohio and Tennessee with a period of significance from the late eighteenth century up to and including the Civil War, comparing their interpretation of women during the settlement period, and in religion, abolition, and slavery. This analysis seeks to answer how the selected historic house museums interpret women and offers new interpretive techniques for gender interpretation.