Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites (American Association for State and Local History)

Product Description

Women’s history is everywhere, not only in historic house museums named for women but also in homes named for famous men, museums of every conceivable kind, forts and battlefields, even ships, mines, and in buckets. Women’s history while present at every museum and historic site remains less fully interpreted in spite of decades of vibrant and expansive scholarship. Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites connects that scholarship with the tangible resources and the sensuality that form museums and historic sites– the objects, architecture and landscapes– in ways that encourage visitor fascination and understanding and center interpretation on the women active in them. With numerous examples that focus on all women and girls, it appropriately includes everyone, for women intersect with every other human group. This book provides arguments, sources (written, oral, and visual), and tools for finding women’s history, preserving it, and interpreting it with the public. It uses the framework of Significance (importance), Knowledge Base (research in primary, secondary, and tertiary sources), and Tangible Resources (the preserved physical embodiment of history in objects, architecture, and landscapes). Discusses traditional and technology-assisted interpretation and provides Tools to implement Doing Women’s History in Public. Using a hospitality model, museums and historic sites are the locales where we assemble, learn from each other, and take our insights into a more gender-shared future.

Review

Dr. Heather Huyck has been a passionate proponent for women’s history throughout her career, as a National Park Service historian and interpreter, as a Congressional staffer, as a lecturer and researcher on women’s history in multiple forums, and as a collaborator with many colleagues sharing her commitment to bring women’s stories to their rightful place in the American narrative
. Doing Women’s History in Public
shares her wide-ranging knowledge of the many roles and achievements of women in shaping our families, our communities and our nation with the reader interested in preserving these stories and their associated artifacts, structures, and landscapes. Her footnotes, bibliographies, and guidance on accessing important information data bases will benefit both the historic site manager and anyone interested in the breadth of contemporary writing on women’s history. As important, based on her experience and observations of the efforts of many others, Dr. Huyck provides a clear step-by-step strategy, through the ‘Tool Kits’ that conclude each chapter, to guide the reader in gathering and managing the information on their site’s significance and in compiling a knowledge base to support interpretation and education programs and preservation of its tangible resources.
Doing Women’s History in Public
is a major addition to the American State and Local History’s book series and of interest to all committed to preserving the stories of all Americans. — Stephanie Toothman, Ph.D., Former Associate Director and Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service

What an invaluable resource! Heather Huyck has distilled decades of experience in interpreting women’s history at public sites into ten succinct chapters replete with useful information about a wide range of sources and how each might be researched and employed to introduce visitors to the diversity of women’s lives in the American past. Each chapter is followed by a set of suggested ‘tools’ for implementing the ideas within. Every museum and historic site in the country should rush to acquire a copy of this remarkable book, which will soon prove indispensable to all. — Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita, Cornell University

Heather Huyck,
Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites
, is an