Forwarded by Robert Tabak.  I have yet read the book reviewed below.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 16:37:03 -0400
From: H-Net Reviews <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Jackson on West, _Domesticating History_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (June, 2000)

Patricia West.  _Domesticating History: The Political Origins of
America's House Museums_.  Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1999.  241
pp.  Bibliographic references, index.  $40.00 (cloth), ISBN
1-56098-811-8; $17.95 (paper) ISBN 1-56098-836-3.

Reviewed for H-PCAACA by Millie Jackson
<[log in to unmask]>, Grand Valley State University

In _Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House
Museums_ Patricia West provides the background for four important
house museums as well as a much denser history of the house museum
movement in American history. The museums discussed, chronologically
according to founding date, include George Washington's Mount
Vernon, Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, Thomas Jefferson's
Monticello and the Booker T. Washington National Monument. West's
history progresses from the work of women's voluntary associations
in the 19th century to the profession of museumship in the 20th
century. This study focuses on the struggles represented in
political, gender, class and racial battles.

Political battles surrounded the establishment of Mount Vernon due,
in part, to the onset of the Civil War.  The Mount Vernon's Ladies'
Association of the Union (MVLA) envisioned a "public history museum"
(3) and thought that the home could unify the country.  Even though
"Mount Vernon's establishment...reflected the primacy of the
iconographic, sacralized home popularly envisioned as the heart of
nineteenth century America" (1) conflicts between states rights and
national rights took over.  Mount Vernon would become the prototype
for later movements to establish house museums and future groups
would learn from the women's experiences.

West's narrative demonstrates how history has been sanitized by well
meaning committees who worked to fund house museums.  The Concord
Women's Club invented their own version of Louisa May Alcott's life
and home by promoting the home as a museum and Alcott's life as the
story of Little Women. For these women "Little Women and Orchard
House were emblems of virtuous and ostentatiously traditional
domesticity that could establish a reassuring stability they entered
the new world of the twentieth century" (65).  However, Alcott's
life was not like the one she depicted in Little Women. Alcott's
involvement in women's suffrage and reform were ignored initially.
The establishment of Orchard House as a museum also shows the way
life was changing in America. The intervening years between the
founding of Mount Vernon in the mid-nineteenth century and Orchard
House in 1912 had been ones of progress for women and for the
country.  The women involved in the preservation of Orchard House
were members of a study club who were conscious of "pressing social
problems and "conservationist" impulses toward their solutions"
(56-57).  These ladies were not "quaint, rather apolitical,
antiquarian ladies ...concerned chiefly with tea parties and
Chippendale" (59) anymore than the ladies of the MVLA had been but
they did view society differently.  The Concord Women's Club had a
political and social agenda to "save" a town which they saw changing
due to the growth of suburbs and the influx of immigrants as well as
preserve Orchard House.

West outlines how the new "museum men" (50) took over the house
museum movement from women's organizations in the early twentieth
century.  These men included professional architects, state and
federal government officials and industrialists.  Wealthy men such
as John D. Rockefeller created Colonial Williamsburg while Henry
Ford worked on Greenfield Village. These projects represent
recreations of historic homes on a larger scale.  Ford stated that
he had "reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think, is the
best way to preserve at least part of our history and tradition"
(97).  Many explanations for Ford's desire to compile a village of
houses that sometimes seem unrelated are provided.  Rockefeller
"delegated recreation of Colonial Williamsburg to professional
architects" (98). The appeal of Colonial Williamsburg focused on
middle class consumers who took away a style as well as a historic
lesson.

The founding of Monticello and the Booker T. Washington National
Monument signal change in the house museum movement.  Programs of
the federal government, primarily from the New Deal, helped
establish both houses as museums.  Professional men and staffs took
over the work which had once been delegated to women.  Historical
accuracy is no less of a problem than it had been during the
previous fifty years, however.  The house museum movement mirrors
the social problems that faced America in the first half of the
twentieth century.

Patricia West's research assists the reader in understanding the
complicated histories of house museums.  The homes represent far
more than domestic life during the era of the inhabitants and, in
fact, sometimes have not represented a historically accurate view at
all.  As many other movements, this one began as women's work which
was later taken over by men.  The book contributes to women's
history as well as to histories of politics, class, race and
architecture.  For example, the discussion of the MVLA compliments
Elizabeth Varon's discussion of the MVLA in _We Mean to Be Counted:
White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia_ (Chapel Hill: The U
of N.C. Press, 1998) as well as discussions in other recent works on
women's voluntary associations. West's work dispels the mythologized
views of founding house museums.  This is a work which will be
valuable to scholars in many disciplines.

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