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

About the Book

A complete guide to interpreting women’s history.

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.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Significance
Chapter 1: Why Women’s History Matters
Knowledge Base
Chapter 2: Researching Women’s History
Chapter 3: Written Sources: Read All About Her
Chapter 4: Oral Sources: Sermons & Parrots
Chapter 5: Visual Sources: Maps & Photographs
Tangible Resources
Chapter 6: Landscapes: Fields and Gardens
Chapter 7: Buildings & Structures: Cents Shops, Houses, and Canals
Chapter 8: Objects: Who Packed This Lunch Bucket?
Chapter 9: Preservation: From Great-Grandmothers to Great-Granddaughters
Interpretation
Chapter 10: Interpretation: Sharing Women’s History with Visitors
Appendix: Organizations, Websites & Journals
Bibliography

About the Author :
Heather Huyck is a public historian long dedicated to “tell the whole story,” and interpret quality women’s history. An activist-scholar as well as a park ranger, manager, and organizer, she has a PhD from the University of Minnesota, worked on the foundational Women’s History Sources Survey, and did professional staff work for 81 enacted laws in the US House of Representatives. She taught women’s history to the National Park Service and the College of William & Mary and has made numerous presentations. A past President of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, she has been an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, AHA Congressional Fellow, and AHA Feis Public History Award recipient. She worked to preserve Maggie Walker documents and serves on the Mary McLeod Bethune Federal Commission. She has travelled extensively to museums in the US and Canada and to 324 national parks.

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. 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. Heather Huyck, Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites, is an indispensable guide for anyone working in the field of public history. Women have been a critical part of every aspect of our history, and their absence from the stories we tell about the past impairs our understanding. Heather Huyck’s description of how to identify and interpret women’s presence is one of the best explorations of historical research methods that I have seen. Indeed, it is necessary reading not only for public historians but also for traditional academics so that we all can find those on the margins and understand not only their lives but also the ways their presence alters the broader stories we can tell.