ABSTRACT
TH R E E P R I N C I PA L T H O U G H T S A B O U T women and museums evolved from my work on the 1991 exhibition, “Men and Women: A History of Costume, Gender, and Power,” at the National Museum of American History. Several of these tenets were imperfectly expressed in the exhibition, for they represent not so much what I brought to the exhibition as what I have taken from it. In this essay I discuss three interrelated topics: the audience we address, the artifacts we interpret, and the subjects that we choose to teach.
