Museums, archives and gender

As historians, we often still rely on physical archives to weave together piecemeal histories about museums, and a considerable body of critique has pointed to the archive’s partial qualities. In this respect, the growing interest in the study of gender and identity in museums has often overlooked how institutional archives – and the logics that govern them – may be also gendered. The paper addresses this problem, looking at scholarly work in archive studies to advocate a shift in the study of museum histories from ‘archives-as-things’ to ‘archiving-as-process’. New directions in museum studies, it argues, must attend to the materiality of museum archives regarding their construction of gendered narratives. The article casts light on this problem through the case study of a female typist at the National Gallery in the late 1940s. By exposing the rationality of the Gallery’s ‘archival forms’, the article suggests that such findings help us reframe the narratives of museum professionalisation about the post-war Gallery and disrupt their neat historical continuity. In its close examination of archival sources and omissions, the paper considers the ways in which gendered power relations are inscribed in the museum archive and how they delimit our possibilities for writing histories about the museum.