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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.