ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the presence of feminist arts and curatorial interventions within heritage spaces, and potential for advocating for the rights of women and girls. It explores the social implications of a feminist arts and heritage practice that moves beyond programming interventions, to organisational change more broadly. The women’s suffrage movement is part of our feminist memory, and to deny the politics of this feminist memory is to risk appropriating an important anniversary. Developing a framework for evaluating feminist curatorial and arts practices in the context of the National Trust is itself a new challenge. Feminist curating is activist; it seeks change through art, museology, and heritage discourses; it challenges oppressive structures. Feminist curation has been most clearly embraced within the contemporary galleries sector. An attitude towards the artwork itself is entirely entangled within an ideology-based response to the potential feminist politics underpinning the artwork.
