ABSTRACT
The word museum, with its embedded reference to the Greek muses, implies that the institution has been gendered since its inception. Despite the word’s suggestion that the museum might house the nine goddesses, the museum was originally very much man’s home, and often his castle or palace. The Western museum grew out of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities1 into the private picture gallery on a nobleman’s estate (think Darcy’s ancestral portraits in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). In the nineteenth century, large museums began to manifest themselves in one of two ways: as incarnations of the power of the state, such as the Louvre, the repository of treasures Napoleon looted from the rest of Europe (Duncan 1995), or as proof of industrial barons’ wealth and their passport into higher echelons of society. For the populace, establishments such as Peale’s Museum in the early American republic served as places of entertainment rather than edification (Brigham 1995) until they were supplanted later in the century by institutions with the goal of acculturating the masses.2
