ABSTRACT
The politics of storage were significant factors in the relationships established between Winifred Penn-Gaskell, of Devon, England and Mrs C.A. Tusch, of Berkeley, California, and the respective museums to which their collections passed, the Science Museum in South Kensington and the nascent Air Museum (later the National Air and Space Museum (NASM)) in Washington D.C. In this chapter I examine the means by which two women, both born in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, turned their homes into sites of varying visibility for the display and collection of objects relating to aviation history. Furthermore, I outline some of the complex history of connections between museums and the home as places of collection and storage, and deviate from the standard pattern for such investigations by looking not at the use and display of technologies of housework, but of objects relating to heavier-than-air flight.
In Tusch’s case, her home storage of aviation memorabilia and United States Air Force war trophies endowed her efforts with a new legitimacy, one that was politically convenient for the narrative of American aviation in the post-war era. In this paradigm, the family home, and the mother’s presence there, was the root of all American invention and success. To mark this, a proposal was put forward to relocate not only the collections of Tusch, but her entire cottage, from its Berkeley position to the centre of a new Air Museum on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The politics of storage and invisibility worked differently for her contemporary, Winifred Penn-Gaskell, whose collections (though curated with knowledge and care) were devalued by her amassing of objects in her isolated Devonshire cottage.
While a small part of the Penn-Gaskell collection remains on display at the Science Museum, the gallery labels contain no information about the woman who created it. Nothing of the Tusch collection survives on display in NASM, despite her home having acted as a symbol for the post-war attempt to build an American Air Museum. In this way, this chapter will speak to one of the workshop’s themes, ‘The Unshown, The Unshowable, The No-Longer-Shown’.
