Master thesis – Jasmijn van Houten Table of contents
Page number:
1. Women’s history and public history
1.1: From academia to the museum 2
1.2: Comparing strategies of presenting women’s history in
museums 5
2. Women in the spotlights
2.1: Els Kloek’s ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ 7
2.2: In and around the exhibition 12
3. Women and wartime: a museum perspective
3.1: Introduction 16
3.2: Exhibiting women in war museums 17
3.3: The National Military Museum: Theory vs. practice 19
3.4: The Resistance Museum: Women’s voices 28
4. The balancing act: women and society
4.1: Introduction: The Amsterdam Museum 33
4.2: Amsterdam DNA 34
4.3: The Golden Age 38
Conclusion 46
1. Women’s history and public history
1.1: From academia to the museum
Women’s history became a more prominent academic field of study in the 1970s, thanks to feminist critiques of history writing. Second-wave feminists scholars argued that women needed to be made visible in history to show the importance of their contributions to society and furthermore to recognize that history had been limited by focusing too narrowly on male achievements. Discussions that challenged the construction of history and the absence of women in it, also arose in the
Netherlands. Dutch historian Francisca de Haan discussed this period in her 1991 essay, ‘Women behind the dykes: reflections on the situation in the Netherlands.’ She explained that “in the Netherlands questions about the history of women and about the male-dominated traditional version of history were first raised by students around 1974. In the fifteen years since then, women’s history has developed a strong ‘infrastructure’.”1 Additionally, trying to make women’s history accessible to a wider audience was an important aspect of the work of Dutch feminist historians in the late 1970s, as they distributed collections of articles and organized a number of exhibitions on women’s history. I want to examine the current state of women’s history in public exhibitions and find out if the growing attention for women’s history since the 1970s has led to a permanent integration of women’s history in exhibitions in Dutch museums today. I will discuss the kind of narratives on women’s history that Dutch museums incorporate in their exhibitions and what different strategies they use to present these narratives. I have selected several case studies that allow me to explore women’s history from different angles and within different historical themes.
According to De Haan, the exhibitions that Dutch feminists created in the 1970s were visited by thousands of people. She added that, “more than other branches of the historical discipline in the Netherlands, women’s history has succeeded in crossing the boundaries of the universities and reaching a wider audience.”2 In my thesis I will argue that while some of women’s history has indeed found its way to the museum, Dutch museums often fail to illustrate the roles women have played within all realms of society either by focusing too narrowly on achievements of a few great women in certain areas or neglecting the roles of women in others. These issues are not only specific to Dutch
1
Fransisca de Haan, ‘Women’s history behind the dykes: Reflections on the situation in the Netherlands’ in: Karen M. Offen et al., Writing women’s history: international perspectives (Basingstoke 1991), 259. 2 ‘De Haan, ‘Women’s history behind the dykes’, 260.
museums. As historian Edith P. Mayo noted in her 1983 article on the connection between women’s and public history in the United States, women’s history had actually been largely neglected by public historians. Women’s history is either not included in museums or lacking any social context, she said. Mayo urged for a reinvention of history by channeling scholarship to a museum audience and
broadening public understanding.3 It is important for museum curators to consider the consequences of the ways they interpret women’s history in their exhibitions because the museum is a platform through which wider audiences can be reached and influenced.
Since the 1970s, many Dutch women’s historians have been opposed to seeing women’s history as a separate new specialism and opted for an integrative approach instead. With this approach, they intended to smoothly blend women’s history with other historical themes. Els Kloek and Fia Dieteren stated in their introduction to their 1990 edited collection Writing women into
history, that women’s historians actively approached historical sources which resulted in new ways
of reading and critically interpreting the history of society to include women. Kloek and Dieteren collected essays by women’s historians on different historical periods, which all demonstrated how this inclusion could be achieved. They also argued that women’s history covers such a broad area that it can hardly be defined as a specialism because women’s historians pose the same questions and struggle with similar problems as historians of other social issues.4 Most Dutch women’s historians wanted to stay within the frameworks of traditional history writing, without claiming any special treatment for women’s history. This is also reflected in Kloek’s more recent publication, 1001
women in Dutch history, which emphasizes women’s individuality rather than their communal issues.
Internationally, women’s historians searched for methods to bring out women in history and change history writing in general to advance the history of women. In 1975, U.S. historian Gerda Lerner argued that historians had been searching for a conceptual framework and methodology for women’s history in vain, because they were all based on assumptions of a patriarchal ordering of values. Lerner said that, “in order to write a new history worthy of the name, we will have to recognize that no single methodology and conceptual framework can fit the complexities of the historical experience of all women.”5 Instead, she said, “only a new history firmly based on this recognition and equally concerned with men, women, the establishment and the passing away of
3 Edith P. Mayo, ‘Women’s history and public history: the museum connection’, The Public Historian 5 (1983), 67-70.
4 Els Kloek and Fia Dieteren, Writing women into history (Amsterdam 1990), 7-10.
patriarchy, can lay claim to being a truly universal history.”6 Lerner’s method included what she called, “transitional history,” in which new categories are added to the traditional framework of historical analysis, such as sexuality and reproduction. She further stated that women have an equal share in historical events as men, and should therefore be treated as such. No single framework could deal with women in history, instead new questions should be asked. Lerner contemplated whether women’s history could be considered social history but concluded that even though a social history methodology is useful for women’s history, it must be placed within a different conceptual framework. For example, she said, “historians working in family history ask a great many questions pertaining to women, but family history is not in itself women’s history. It is no longer sufficient to view women mainly as members of families.”7 Her strategy was more complex than the approach of the early Dutch women’s historians, because Lerner demanded that historians not only ask new questions but also redefine the relationships between men and women.
During the course of the increasing attention for women’s history, some women’s historians started challenging the concept of public and private spheres. Feminist theorists also questioned, and continue to question, the usefulness of the public versus private domains. In her introduction to
Gendered Domains: Rethinking public and private in women’s history, published in 1992, historian
Dorothy Helly reflected that feminist theorists “contend that the dichotomy mystifies or misleads us into thinking of life in two separate boxes and makes it easy to assume that each of us fits more naturally into one box or the other, according to our sex.”8 Helly argued that in fact, private lives are shaped by political realities, and that the same power dynamics operate at home as in the workplace. But, according to Helly, because of our use of the concept of divided spheres, women’s oppression has been encoded and disguised. She therefore urged towards a “contemporary rethinking of an ancient dichotomy”.9 The discussion was not only held by historians but in other fields as well. In a 1975 essay on public and private domains in the South of France, anthropologist Rayna Reiter explained that the work women did at home created opportunities for men to work outside the house and thus make money to support the family. But because of their private status, women’s activities went unnoticed in public thinking. She said “it is women’s labor that underwrites the capacities of families to produce these resources. Yet this labor is socially unrecognized or accorded a subordinate status while power and prestige are vested in the public domain, which is increasingly
6 Lerner, ‘Placing women in history’, 13. 7 Lerner, ‘Placing women in history’, 8. 8
Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, Gendered domains: rethinking public and private in women’s history (Ithaca 1992), xi.
controlled by a class of men.”10 Reiter argued that if separate spheres existed, they were socially constructed and susceptible to change.
1.2: Comparing strategies of presenting women’s history in museum exhibitions
Theoretical frameworks to advance women’s history writing have led to presenting women’s history in museum exhibitions in several ways. A distinction can be made between exhibitions that focus on the lives of women as a separate group and exhibitions that include women in the general historical theme of the museum. I will analyze both ways of presenting women’s history in exhibitions. In chapter two I will discuss the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition which was curated by historian Els Kloek, and which ran from February 14 until May 20, 2013 at the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam. Kloek created the exhibition together with the same-titled voluminous reference book which highlights the lives of 1001 Dutch women in history, going as far back as the Middle Ages. It is interesting to analyze her style as an academic in relation to the exhibition she put together. Kloek has often stated in interviews that women should not be studied as a separate, unified group and that she prefers to approach women’s history in a biographical way. She has argued that women in history who achieved extraordinary things, should be known for their individual achievements and not because they are part of the subcategory ‘women’.11 I studied publications on the exhibition and the book of 1001 women in Dutch history to gather responses to the project, as well as Kloek’s motivation behind it. She worked on critiquing history writing for many years but with this project she wanted to catch up on history, rather than critique it.12 I will argue that simply adding women to history creates the false notion that it results in a more complete version of history. In fact this approach risks neglecting the social historical context in which these women acted and therefore leaves out many women in history.
In the third chapter, I will compare two museums that focus on traditionally male-dominated subjects to see how women are portrayed in a men’s world. The case studies deal with wartime from two perspectives, on the battlefield and at the home front. I will discuss the permanent exhibition at the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam to focus on women at the home front, as many women joined the resistance during the Second World War. I conducted interviews with curators from both
10 Helly and Reverby, Gendered domains, 5.
11 Marianne van Exel, ‘Els Kloek en de weg naar 1001 vrouwen’ isgeschiedenis, 2 juli 2012,
<http://www.isgeschiedenis.nl/interviews/els-kloek-en-de-weg-naar-1001-vrouwen/> (21 June 2013). 12 Elma Drayer, ‘Natuurlijk was Kenau een heldin. Interview Els Kloek, Trouw, October 2012,
museums. Through studying literature, I found examples of exhibitions in other countries that use women’s narratives in exhibitions on war history that show examples of women at the home front and on the battlefield. In the Resistance Museum, the curators tried to integrate different
experiences of Dutch people from all realms of society, which has created much space to include women’s history. The new National Military Museum is my case study for women in a military environment. In parts of their permanent exhibition, the amount of women’s stories will be based on representative requirements. These requirements correspond with the quota that the Ministry of Defense has imposed for the amount of women in the Dutch armed forces. This approach has led to a limited collection of extraordinary female fighters in the exhibition. However, I argue that including women’s narratives in wartime history museums, entails showing the public a broader view on the experiences of people during wartime. Therefore, stories of ordinary women should also be told. The Resistance Museum offers examples of such stories as told by women. Their approach reveals insights into wartime experiences that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The National Military Museum merely searched for parallels to men’s stories. Consequently, general experiences of women in the military are neglected. Past collecting habits and traditional values have led to a neglect of women’s history.
In the final chapter, I will analyze the permanent ‘Amsterdam DNA’ exhibition and the temporary ‘Golden Age’ exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum. I interviewed two curators at the museum to understand the visions they had for the ‘Amsterdam DNA’ and the ‘Golden Age’ exhibitions. I used literature to find examples of exhibitions abroad to find out how other curators have tackled similar issues. The museum deals with the history of Amsterdam from the founding of the city until the present day. Obviously women played an important role in life in Amsterdam, whether it was within the household or outside of it. However, the permanent exhibition focuses on a solely progressive presentation of the city since its founding days. Therefore, the emphasis lies heavily on public events which only tell the story of a small group of people. I argue that this focus neglects the history of the majority of Amsterdam society, of people who witnessed these events but did not actively participate in them. I argue that the contributions of women in their home spaces should not be narrowed down to the roles they had in the public sphere. I also argue that the type of objects the museum uses is very important for the presentation of women’s history. The Amsterdam Museum heavily relies on the use of paintings that were formerly owned by elite groups of
Amsterdam society, which gives off a view on society that mainly focuses on the lives within these groups, leaving no space for ordinary lives. When it is in fact the combination of ordinary and extraordinary lives and the major events as well as long-term processes that define the history of a place.
2. Women in the spotlights
2.1: Els Kloek’s ‘1001 women in Dutch history’
From February 14 until May 20 2013, the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosted an exhibition called ‘1001 women in Dutch history’. The exhibition was curated by historian Els Kloek, editor of the accompanying online catalogue and reference book which was published on the same day that the exhibition opened. With the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ project, Kloek decided to approach women in history as individuals, by focusing on 1001 women who accomplished something extraordinary. In an interview with Dutch newspaper Trouw, she explained her strategy: “women’s history has two components: it is about catching up on history as well as a critique on science. I had been working on critiquing science for twenty years so I felt like focusing on catching up for a while.”13 For ten years, Kloek and her team collected stories of forgotten women to make them more visible in history through the book and the exhibition, and thus adding them to the general historical narrative. However, I argue that critiquing science is an integral part of women’s history and that simply adding women to history is not enough.
With her traditional approach, Kloek is creating a greater body of women’s stories but this will not inevitably lead to a better understanding of women’s history. Moreover, it gives the
impression that only women who did something noteworthy are important actors of history, when in fact ordinary women’s stories are also needed to represent a diverse history of women. While women’s historians agree that the approach is outdated, museum institutions often use traditional methods for women’s history. This recently led to a conflict between women’s historians and the National Women’s History Museum in the United States. Women’s historian Sonya Michel, former member of the Scholarly Advisory Council of the online National Women’s History Museum platform, criticized director Joan Wages for her conservative attitude towards women’s history. She said the director’s focus on great women is too narrow to capture the manifold ways in which women have shaped U.S. history and that, “indeed, most of us long ago abandoned the “add-women-and-stir” approach to women’s history, whereby one simply attempted to find female parallels to prominent
13 Elma Drayer, ‘Natuurlijk was Kenau een heldin. Interview Els Kloek, Trouw, October 2012, <http://www.elskloek.nl/files/Interview_Els_Kloek.pdf> (9 April 2014), 13.
male figures and patterns of accomplishment.”14 Michel stated that it is the goal of women’s
historians nowadays to show the full diversity of women’s history without portraying it as a seamless path from corset and kitchen to boardroom and the halls of Congress, and that it is possible to show this in a museum. But while the National Women’s History Museum has been trying to raise funds for a physical museum space, director Wages decided that the services of professional historians were no longer required. Without scholarly supervision, it seems the museum is headed towards becoming a collection of female firsts, like the first state to grant women suffrage and the first woman to be elected to Congress. According to Michel, this shows great disrespect for the work that women’s historians have been doing over the past forty years.15
Kloek’s lexicon includes many female firsts as well, like Aletta Jacobs, the first female university student and doctor in the Netherlands, and Geertruida Beliën, the first female city mayor in the Netherlands. Kloek’s collection of extraordinary women therefore seems like something that Sonya Michels and many other women’s historians, would typically reject. Kloek’s initial motivation to start collecting stories of women’s lives was an article she worked on for the exhibition about seventeenth-century artist Judith Leyster, at the Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem in 1992. She later said she felt the urgency to chart the accomplishments of special women like Leyster systematically. In 2003, Kloek received subsidies to start an online Women’s Lexicon. Prominent Dutch historian Herman Pleij criticized her work for being a form of ‘apartheid’, by separating women’s history from the rest of history. As a prominent person in the field of history in the Netherlands, his comments reflect a culture that is very hostile towards women’s history as a specialist subject. This aversion towards women’s history in turn could explain why Kloek then decided to found a Biographical Portal of the Netherlands, of which the women’s lexicon became a sub-part. As to why she decided to make a physical version of the lexicon, Kloek said, “a digital reference is useful, and specialists definitely appreciate it. But if you don’t know which women you’re looking for, you cannot find them. That is why I made a paper version so you can browse through it.”
According to Kloek, the main problems with women’s history writing started in the
nineteenth century. During this time, history writing became more scientific as historians changed their approach from storytelling to source criticism. This approach was based on a method that was developed by German historian Leopold von Ranke, in which official literature and sources became
14 Sonya Michel, ‘The National Women’s History Museum apparently doesn’t much care for women’s
historians’ New Republic, April 2014 <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117259/national-womens-history-museum-apparently-doesnt-much-care-w> (30 April 2014).
centralized. The true historian should focus on the history of his nation and research king and parliament, international relations, secret diplomacy and so on. The consequences for women’s history writing are widely acknowledged by now. In the book Gendering modern German history, the editors Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert stated that, “this focus, in turn, produced a set of relevant although limited conceptual and analytical tools to use in writing historical narratives, including notions of significance and methods of designating historical periods and turning points. Needless to say, the whole project was about men’s public worlds, although not acknowledged as such. This highly gendered narrative was presented as general history.”16 With ‘1001 women’, Kloek wanted to break the pattern that was continued by structuralists at the end of the nineteenth century, who turned their attention towards social sciences but, just like the rankians, wanted to come as close to the historical truth as possible. Kloek added, “if there were no official sources confirming that women had been fighting on the city walls or had rescued their cities from the enemy, such stories were passed on as fibs, legends to brush up the past.”17 Kloek wants these stories to be recognized as actual truths.
The encyclopedic way in which Kloek has gathered the lives of women is her way of giving forgotten women of the past back their individuality. This has resulted in an extensive list of women’s stories, some of which most people will indeed have never heard of and others that are more well-known. Kloek went back as far as the Middle Ages to reconstruct the lives of women that have been obscured from history. The book is arranged in time periods, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before the start of the ‘1001 women’ project, Kloek had been working on integrating women with general history for years, but eventually she said the emphasis of women’s historians was too much on ordinary women. In the seventies, she was one of the first people to practice women’s history at the University of
Amsterdam. As a result of a new trend in history writing, ‘history from below’, women’s history became a field of study alongside studies of minorities, homosexuals, workers and children. In her introduction to ‘1001 women in Dutch history’, Kloek stated that, “it felt like an act of justice, a way to recover the balance. But in women’s history, the emphasis was posed too strongly on ordinary women for a long time. There was a lot of focus on women’s organizations and women as a group. It can offer interesting insights, but after a while I felt that this approach did not satisfy me. If women
16
Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, Gendering modern German history: rewriting historiography (New York 2007), 2-3.
should be offered a place in historical writing, they also deserve their individuality.”18 However, by collecting the stories of these 1001 individuals in one place, Kloek actually created a new group of women. She lists them together without them having any social relation to each other, besides the fact that they are semi-forgotten and female. In doing this, Kloek actually reinforced the fact that women do not have a place in history yet and obstructed her initial goals of giving women back their place in historical writing, as historical writing requires more social context.
According to Dutch scholar Saskia E. Wieringa, autonomy vs. integration is an ongoing issue in women’s studies. In her 2008 article on the gender revolution of the Amsterdam women’s archives and libraries, she argued that by singling out great women, complex social structures of history are ignored. Wieringa urged women’s historians to ask themselves new questions about whose histories they are collecting and why they limit themselves to women’s history when they could also possibly include issues of gender and transgender. 19 The issues she discussed are reflected in museums today because museums often choose to exhibit the history of extraordinary women, like the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition. Other women’s historians agree that it is time to reshape the
presentations of women’s history in exhibitions. Margaret Stetz argued in her 2005 article ‘Feminist exhibitionism’ that exhibitions contribute to practices of women’s studies because it offers scholars a chance to work and collaborate with non-academics. However, she agreed with Julia M. Klein who argued that it is time for a next step. Klein said that, “so far the exhibitions at some institutions have favored the “antiquated ‘great woman’ approach to history,” but the next phase will be to present exhibits that “go beyond celebration to historical complexity, that don’t shrink from tackling contentious issues in a provocative way”, she added.20
Historical complexity can be created by explaining the social context in which individuals live. Social environments generally define how events are perceived by individuals within a society. This can also determine what prejudices women faced. By integrating women’s stories into already existing narratives, or challenging existing narratives with new ones, museums create more historical complexity. Showing the differences between classes of society can furthermore explain why some women could do certain things, and others could not. So-called “ordinary” women can thereby add perspective to the success stories of extraordinary women. Without social context, it is impossible to
18
Kloek, 1001 vrouwen, 7.
19 Wieringa, ‘The sexual revolution of the Amsterdam women’s archives and library’, 9-10. 20
Margaret D. Stetz, ‘Feminist exhibitionism: when the women’s studies professor is a curator’, NWSA Journal 17 (2005), 208-216.
understand the experiences of women in their time. Furthermore, by separating men from women in exhibitions, the importance of women’s achievements might either be exaggerated or diminished. U.S. art historian and feminist art critic Katy Deepwell discussed the problem with presenting artists as ‘great women artists’ in her 2006 article on feminist curatorial strategies. She explained that, “certain trends in liberal arts education which developed through the 1980s have promoted this version of a history of “great women artists” as a supplement of art history.” According to Deepwell, this thinking encouraged students to study female artists like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe for their achievements as women while acknowledging Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, despite (or rather because of) their equally turbulent lives, for their contributions to “Art.”21
So, when women are presented separately from their male contemporaries in exhibition spaces, their position will be based on what they were able to achieve despite being women. For men on the other hand, their ability to be successful is an unstated fact in most exhibitions. Therefore, the focus can shift more towards what they did rather than the fact that they were successful at all. If Kahlo and O’Keefe would be presented in an exhibition together with Van Gogh and Picasso, perhaps the emphasis would shift more to their art instead of their achievements as women. On the other hand, exhibition spaces also offer an opportunity for curators to explain that these women were perhaps not as well-known, because of the prejudices they faced as women in their time. But separating the women from the men actually makes them more subject to prejudice. Furthermore, an exhibition that deals solely with women is bound to attract more female visitors than male visitors, thereby reaching a less wider audience.
With her focus on extraordinary women, Kloek is creating a collection of archetypes that are not only used to diminish the position of women, but also overemphasizing the roles of extraordinary women. At the opening of the ‘1001 women’ exhibition, Dutch Minister for Education Jet
Bussemaker declared that, “we are standing on the shoulders of giants and this exhibition reminds us that we are writing history for our daughters as well.”22 Even though her statement emphasizes the importance of women’s history, she could have been more nuanced. Women have come a long way thanks to prominent female figures, but they did not achieve everything on their own. It is important for ‘our daughters’ to understand that ordinary women were also part of the process.
21 Katy Deepwell, ‘Feminist curatorial strategies and practices since the 1970s’ in: Janet Marstine,
New museum theory and practice (Malden 2006), 69.
22 Clara van de Wiel, ‘Bussemaker opent tentoonstelling ‘1001 vrouwen’, Folia Web, February 2013 <http://www.foliaweb.nl/organisatie/bussemaker-opent-tentoonstelling-1001-vrouwen/> (30 April 2014).
NRC columnists Frits Abrahams’ review of the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition shows how such separatism enabled him to stereotype women. On his visit to the exhibition, Abrahams wrote, “I soon discovered – and I hope miss Kloek does not resents me for it – that the most colorful women were to be found in the category ‘adventure and sensation’ rather than the ‘poetry and writing’ (the practitioners are inside too much) or ‘charity, care and patronage’ (these women are too
virtuous).”23 Through stereotyping the women in the last two categories, he diminishes their achievements. And by saying these women were ‘inside too much’, he labels them as boring and therefore uninteresting. If this were a collection of 1001 great men in Dutch history, I doubt if Abrahams would suggest that praised poets like Joost van den Vondel were inside too much. Apparently when it comes to women’s history, it is easy for some people to place them within behavioral stereotypes. Whilst openly diminishing literary women on the one hand, Abrahams seems to mock the strong female persona on the other hand. He starts of his piece describing how curator Els Kloek wrote a stern comment in the exhibition’s guestbook in reply to a woman who was wondering why Anneke van Baalen was not in the book. Kloek wrote, “she is in there, look more carefully.” In response, Abrahams noted that he had to be really careful with his criticism, because apparently, “Kloek strikes back”. With this comment he seems to try to suggest that he is scared of the repercussions of Kloek if he would criticize the exhibition. Looking at his overall comments in the column, Abrahams seems to try and push women towards either being too aggressive and strong, or too dull or virtuous. He is labelling women for their personalities rather than their achievements. His comments are further evidence of a hostile attitude amongst high profile cultural critics in the Netherlands against the presentation of women’s history. With this in mind, it might be harder for curators to tackle issues of women’s history for a fear criticism.
2.2: In and around the exhibition
The design for the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition at the Special Collections archive was quite simple. There were a lot of excerpts from the book on the walls of the space, which had been copied directly from the reference book onto the labels. This literally made the exhibition a “book-on-the-wall”. This is something museum curators generally try to avoid because it is hard to read everything if there is too much text in an exhibition and this is known to be off-putting to many
23 Frits Abrahams, ‘1001 vrouwen’, NRC Handelsblad, February 2013,
visitors. The type of objects in the ‘1001 women’ exhibition were typically things that indicated what the women were known for. Examples were a copy of the book that one of the women had
published, as well as a degree that one of them had obtained. The objects were illustrative but did not really add anything to these women’s stories. The exhibition did not really add anything to the book in general. There were some interactive elements, like a test visitors could take to find out which of the 1001 women they resembled the most. But the lack of social context in the book also reflected in the exhibition, as the mere enumeration of women and their achievements made it static and fragmented.
After ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ was published, it became an instant success. Kloek was invited on Dutch television and radio shows and appeared in magazines and newspapers. Within six months after its publication, the book sold over 15.000 copies, “an extraordinary high number for a historical book of this size,” according to the publisher, Vantilt.24 Alongside the online lexicon, the book and the exhibition, people could download a city-walk from the ‘1001 women’ website. The walk was created by ‘Passie voor Professie’, a local tour developing company, in cooperation with ‘de Connecting Link’. The tour guides visitors past several houses in Amsterdam that have something to do with the history of some of the 1001 women.
The project generated a lot of attention as the numbers of sold copies of the book and the popularity of Els Kloek indicated, but did not lead to critiques on the inclusion of women’s history in current history writing and exhibiting. Despite the media attention and the different elements of the project, they did not lead to public discussions about the current status of women’s history writing. The University of Amsterdam Heritage Lab organized a series of lectures, but this led to few results on the enhancement of women’s history in exhibitions. In fact, the project manager of the Heritage Lab stated that the next exhibition which would be on slavery, would not be focusing specifically on women’s stories. Which left the panelists wondering why there would not be any attention for black women’s experiences, since they claimed that there is a lot of highly gendered material for this topic.
Other institutions, like the Royal Dutch Historical Society, paid more critical attention to the position of women in history. The 2013 publication of ‘1001 women’ coincided with the 200-year anniversary of the monarchy in the Netherlands. In 1913, women’s organizations seized the
opportunity of the celebration for the 100th anniversary to hold an exhibition on ‘The Woman:
24
Unknown, ‘Opnieuw herdruk voor 1001 Vrouwen’, Historiek, October 2013 <http://historiek.net/opnieuw-herdruk-1001-vrouwen/37791/> (30 April 2014).
1913’, which dealt with women’s contributions to culture, economics and society, but also with abuses of women’s rights. The Royal Dutch Historical Society held a congress in November 2013 to see once more where things were at for women in the Netherlands. They also created a small-scale exhibition. Nationwide, several other institutions held exhibitions about women’s history and
women’s art as well, of which the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ generated the most publicity. These exhibitions were not aimed at generating attention for 200 years of women’s organizations like the ‘The woman: 1813-1913-2013’ exhibition. Even though their simultaneous appearance created a sense of general increased interest in women’s history, there was a lack of critical responses to women’s history writing and presenting. And by focusing on creating temporary, specialist
exhibitions, museums simply responded to a trend of presenting more women, rather than making an effort to integrate women’s history into their permanent exhibitions and narratives.
This trend has continued in 2014. The multimedia project on the life of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer uses the same approach of highlighting the lives of extraordinary women as the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition does. Kenau was a woman from Haarlem, who fought in the Spanish war to defend her city. In 2014, FU Works released a movie about her life, and several museums and archives in Haarlem organized accompanying exhibitions. The multimedia project was set up to raise awareness for Plan Nederland, a charity which focuses on aiding young girls in developing countries. The website text explains that, “Kenau is a multimedia project about the strength of women, which centralizes around the story of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer. The project started with the movie and many parties have joined to honor our national heroine. In 2014, Kenau’s army of women will start the fight for Plan Nederland.”25 With this statement, the initiators of the project posited Kenau as an undisputable strong woman. They use the same approach as the ‘1001 women’ exhibition by focusing on the life of an extraordinary woman and furthermore, Kenau’s life is deployed to raise money for charity turning her struggle into a metaphor about fighting injustice.
The Historic Museum of Haarlem has an exhibition from January 25 until August 3 which is called, ‘Women with guts – Kenau and other Haarlem heroines’, emphasizing her strength and courage. Kenau is in fact one of the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ and Kloek stated that she has been fascinated by Kenau for many years. She published a historical book, Kenau and Magdalena,
women of the eighty years war, which was published on 6 March 2014. Kenau is a much disputed
25 Unknown, ‘Kenau activiteiten’, Kenau’s Vrouwenleger < http://www.kenausvrouwenleger.nl/kenau-activiteiten>.
historical subject and many historians claim her story is exaggerated, and some even say it is a myth. Kloek put together historical evidence to recapture the process of the ways in which Kenau as a historical figure has been honored and maligned throughout the years. Kloek has been able to follow up on her success of ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ with a book about Kenau and hereby sticking to her belief that individual women’s stories should be brought to the attention more. However, her latest work shows a more historically embedded version of Kenau and therefore adds more depth to the social complexities of the story.
It is hard to conclude whether the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ project mainly stood on its own or if it actually motivated other institutions to initiate exhibitions that focus exclusively on women as well. Nonetheless, the ‘1001 women’ project was part of a broader trend in the
Netherlands which continued throughout 2013 and into 2014. What most of these exhibitions have in common is that they focused on the achievements and stories of extraordinary women. With this focus, museums and other cultural institutions run the risk of neglecting stories of ordinary women in history. They are therefore creating isolated stories of women which are hard to integrate with the general themes in history, which consequently makes it harder to have a lasting impact on
presenting women’s history for the museum. Even though this history has been researched deeply in academia already, the step to the museum has yet to be taken more firmly.
3. Women in wartime: A museum perspective
3.1: Introduction
Women throughout Europe and the United States fulfilled multiple roles during the Great World Wars of the twentieth century, either serving at home or in the armed forces. Women took part in work and political life more actively than in the previous period, by taking up jobs that were normally held by men as the male workforce moved into the army. Especially in the Second World War, women also joined underground resistance movements. Their wartime efforts eventually led to more opportunities for women to participate in the public workforce, even though immediately afterwards women were laid off from war-related jobs. As German historian Gisela Bock explained, “the end of the war brought a veritable surge back to the private sphere. But the clock could not be turned back on the expansion of women’s wage-work.”26 War impacted women’s lives throughout the Western world, altering their position in society. However, in many traditional war museum displays, the focus lies on battlefields and military history, which consequently creates a male-dominated representation. I argue that war-related museums should strive to incorporate the academic evidence of women’s roles during wartime in their exhibitions, instead of focusing on war as a male-dominated activity, to create a more inclusive historical narrative that appeals to a broad audience. According to some scholars, museums must always be a representative reflection of society and serve as educational institutions. When warfare museums lack a female perspective, war may be wrongly perceived as a male-dominated activity. By portraying women’s battles against social
convention and prejudice at the time, museums will be able to contribute to a more inclusive society today. According to museologist Richard Sandell, museums have a great potential to contribute towards combating social inequality, but many within the museum and wider cultural sector remain uncomfortable with overtly social roles. In 2002 Sandell argued that “all museums have an obligation to develop reflexive and self-conscious approaches to collection and exhibition and an awareness and understanding of their potential to construct more inclusive, equitable and respectful
societies.”27 Even though wars have always impacted society as a whole, museums do not
automatically follow suit. But, as Sandell suggested, deliberately incorporating representations that
26 Gisela Bock, Women in European history (Oxford 2002), 174-176. 27 Richard Sandell, Museums, society, inequality (London 2002), 3-5.
are normally left out in museums, can produce more inclusive histories and societies.28 Since 1999, the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C. has a permanent exhibition about the history of Jewish women in the US military called ‘Women in the Military: a Jewish perspective’. In the online exhibition catalogue, the museum director, Harvey S. Friedman, stated the goal of the exhibition as a means to “raise awareness and to educate Americans
specifically on the vital role that Jewish women have played to contribute to America’s war efforts throughout our history.”29 By highly valuing the impact of their exhibition on society, Friedman also acknowledged the purpose of his institution as educational.
In a 2003 review of the ‘Women and war’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, journalist and former war-correspondent Kate Adie wrote that “to understand women’s involvement in both world wars, it is vital to grasp their legal and social status at the time. Convention, prejudice, tradition, and the law all combined to frustrate and proscribe the efforts of thousands of women who were desperate to contribute to the war effort.”30 These factors are only considered when the scope of war history is broadened from armory and battlefields to social aspects of war. Even though academia have kept up, more traditional institutions have not. In another 2003 review of the
‘Women and war’ exhibition, curator Penny Ritchie Calder argued that women and their part in war have been thoroughly studied in the academic field but “in the wider world, politicians and generals continue to argue about whether women should serve in the front line. This exhibition is an
opportunity to see the reality behind all this: a glimpse of the experiences of generations of women who have helped to shape today’s world.”31
3.2: Exhibiting women in war museums
The Imperial War Museum started rethinking its presentation of women as early as 1977, reflecting the rise of second-wave feminism in the early 1960s. The 1977 exhibition ‘Women and war, 1914-18’ demonstrated ways to include women in war exhibitions by presenting a broad narrative. Historian Alyson Mercer explained that in addition to recognizing their contributions, the ‘Women and war, 1914-18’ exhibition detailed the eventual mobilization of all classes of women, while drawing
28 Sandell, Museums, 3-5.
29 The National Museum of American Jewish Military History, ‘Women in the military: A Jewish perspective’ (Washington, D.C. 1999), 4.
30 Kate Adie, ‘The home front’, New Statesman 10 (2003), 40.
attention to the achievements of heroic individuals. She added that, “it was not the intention of the curators to focus on the sacrifices of these heroines, but rather to include them in the larger
narrative celebrating the working lives of ordinary women all over the country through photographs, original films and manuscripts from the museum archives.” Christopher Dowling, curator of the Imperial War Museum at the time, said that the exhibition “should provide a welcome surprise to those who associate this museum with male chauvinist fascists going ‘ackack’ at one another and marveling at the size of the cannon-balls.”32 Also, by uncovering the gap between men and women in wartime, museums contribute to a broader understanding of social inequality and the effects of war on society as a whole. When history is observed or displayed through a gendered lens, it measures the historic opportunities of men with the opportunities of women, which explains the absence of women in areas such as the battlefield. A participant of the ‘University of Amsterdam Heritage Lab’ lecture series ‘Exhibiting Women’, stated on May 15 2013 that, “in some fields, women’s
achievements have been minimal in comparison to men’s. But it should also be our concern to show why this gap in achievement exists.”33 In doing so, the history of war is not only treated as a political subject, but as a social and cultural subject too. This matters because it shows the larger context and structures within society at a certain time.
In this chapter, I will explore how women’s wartime experiences and their changing social status are presented in war-related museums in the Netherlands. I have selected two museums to compare the way women are presented in their exhibitions and to consider if the displays are socially inclusive and representative of women’s wartime history: the National Military Museum in
Soesterberg and the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam. The National Military Museum opens in the fall of 2014, and aims to present the history of the entire Armed Forces in the Netherlands. The Resistance Museum was founded in 1984 and focuses on war and resistance activity within the Netherlands during the Second World War. These case-studies allow for me to compare museum presentations on women’s roles at the home front versus women’s roles on the battlefield.
Differences between these two institutions are reflected in their curatorial strategies. The National Military Museum is more traditional in its approach to collections, as the collection is solely administered by men and largely consists of past donations, whereas the Resistance Museum collects new material more actively. Furthermore, the Resistance Museum has female curators on its
32
Alyson Mercer, ‘The changing face of exhibiting women’s wartime work at the Imperial War Museum’,
Women’s History Review 22 (London 2013), 337.
staff, whereas the roles at the National Military Museum are more traditionally divided. There are no women on the curating staff or in the collection department. The educational department is made up of women only. The representation of women’s history at the Resistance Museum is more equal than at the National Military Museum, as they have included more diverse stories of women. However, the institutions are similar in their approach towards bringing personal stories into the exhibitions. I argue that the Resistance Museum has succeeded in creating an inclusive exhibition with regards to women’s history by telling personal stories, but that the National Military Museum fails to grasp the full potential of using people’s personal lives as their exhibition focuses too narrowly on
extraordinary experiences within the military institution.
3.3: The National Military Museum: Theory vs. practice
The National Military Museum is a combined project of the former Military Air force Museum and the Dutch Army Museum. The Military Air Force Museum was founded in 1968 by former Air Force employees. The Army Museum in Delft was founded in 1913 and exhibited a large private collection by General F.A. Hoefer which has been expanded since. Both museum were publicly funded through the Ministry of Defense. These traditional style museums aimed to show the visitor the history of the Dutch armed forces and current army of the Netherlands. Primarily on display was army equipment, such as weapons, airplanes and tanks. The new National Military Museum will open in the fall of 2014 and is built on top of a former military airbase in Soesterberg. As curator and deputy director of the Military Air force Museum, Alfred Staarman has been involved in preparations for the new museum for the past five years. The work involves re-examining current collections, creating new exhibitions and finding ways to attract new audiences. Staarman says the museum works towards being inclusive by imposing percentages of different groups, like women, to be included in the exhibition. According to Staarman, this theoretical approach often clashes with resources that are available to the curators. However, I argue that limitations are also caused by traditional practices within the museum and the way the institution deals with military history.
As the museum is funded by the Ministry of Defense, the curators had to take its
authoritative preferences into consideration. Alfred Staarman explains his view of the new museum, “about ten years ago, it was decided that the new National Military Museum should focus on people, stories of people. We had always been a museum of stuff, nice things, ugly things, paintings, you
name it. And now it has to be about people. Stories behind those things and behind the people.”34 This strategy is used more commonly in museums today, to create a closer interaction with the visitors. When stories are personal, visitors will be more likely to identify with certain people and events. The lay-out and storytelling of the new museum are also modernized and in line with current trends of interactive presentations. The focus on personal stories is especially evident in a part of the exhibition that focuses on military lives. The stories that are mainly told in the ‘military in the
spotlights’ sub-theme are about people who held high positions within the military ranks or were otherwise extraordinary in their achievements.
According to Staarman, this part of the exhibition accurately shows how the museum deals with women’s history. The selection of thirty military officers was subject to specific representation criteria. The government imposed several minority quotas for military employees in the Netherlands, so the museum has been summoned to reflect the numbers of these minority groups according to their presence in the military. Other criteria related to the four different military segments, so the navy (20%), the air force (20%), the land force (50%) and the military police (10%) must be
represented by their volume. Aside from the military segments, the exhibition must represent different historical periods, going as far back as the seventeenth century. But, as Staarman explains, these are actually not treated representatively. The curatorial staff settled that about half of our military lives should be from the twentieth century because there are more moving images available from that decade, as well as a chance that the people are still alive and able to appear in front of a camera. He adds that, “we considered this approach to be the most attractive to the audience. There is not a lot of autobiographical material from people in the seventeenth century. So it gets easier when you move up on the timeline.”35
Staarman says this type of categorization is the point where theory starts to diverge from museum practice, because by focusing on numbers, interesting stories in the collection may be left out of the exhibition. He explains that to create a representative exhibition, the museum cannot only show generals but this is difficult because the museum collection is the other way around. There are a lot of items from high officials and a relatively small amount of things from common soldiers, simply because there is more awareness among people from higher ranks of the military that it is possible to leave your things with a museum. Staarman argues that, “a lot of soldiers finish their service and maybe use their uniform a couple more times when painting the house. Generals who
34 Alfred Staarman (5 July 2013). Personal interview. 35 Staarman (5 July 2013). Personal interview.
received a lot of badges will feel that they were important and therefore their things must end up in a museum”.36 The curators found it difficult to represent certain groups if their stories were hard to find. Presenting groups such as women, homosexuals and immigrants, as well as the sub-divisions between common soldiers, generals and other high officials, has caused a lot of discussion. As women were not allowed to join the armed forces until the Second World War, there are not many stories of women who held high ranks in the military. Consequently, the National Military Museum does not own many objects of military women. This is due on the one hand to women not
considering donating their things to the museum, and on the other hand to the museum failing to actively collect objects relating to women.
Former collecting habits and a lack of proper cataloguing have been known to frustrate the efforts of museum curators to include a representative amount of women in their exhibition, especially in war museums. Laura Brandon, historian at the Canadian War Museum, discussed the problems with cataloguing and collecting women’s items in her 2010 article ‘Looking for the total woman in wartime: a museological work in progress’. She pointed out the fact that at the Canadian War Museum, the conduct of war has historically been positioned as a primarily masculine activity. Brandon argued that this has been a result of the fact that, “like many others, this museum
developed within a set of specific impulses. These centered on honoring service and sacrifice, glorifying past accomplishments, and encouraging enlistment. More often than not, this discourse resulted in military history exhibitions and collections in which men dominated.” 37 She added that even though the roles of women in wartime were obviously more prominent when we look at them from a broader perspective on society, it is hard to facilitate this perspective in war museums because past collecting habits were not oriented towards female wartime experiences.38 Brandon linked the issue of women in war museums to the vision of historian Joan Scott on gender, which Scott discussed in her groundbreaking 1986 article, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis.’ Scott stressed the importance of examining history as a gendered subject instead of either taking a male or female perspective.39 According to Brandon, in order to create integral exhibitions, war history must be acknowledged as gendered, because “until it is widely accepted that our
understanding of war and the material culture of war is gendered, we will be only marginally further ahead. We can certainly collect the material culture pertaining to women and war, but unless we can
36 Staarman (5 July 2013). Personal interview.
37 Laura Brandon, ‘Looking for the total woman in wartime: A museological work in progress’ in: Amy K. Levin,
Gender, sexuality and museums: A routledge reader (New York 2010), 105-106.
38 Brandon, ‘Looking for the total woman in wartime’, 105-106.
pry out its meaning, we will have no insights, only sterile collections,” she said.40 This means that museum collectors must translate items that are related to women’s wartime experiences into meaningful exhibitions that situate men and women within the history of war and its impact on society.
The curators at the National Military Museum had to primarily focus on percentages of women. Consequently, it is difficult to situate the women they selected within a social context. Staarman compares the status of women within the military to that of immigrants, because the same policies apply to both groups. Since the introduction of the first female military divisions at the end of WWII, the Ministry of Defense has imposed a five percent quota for women in the armed forces. The objective to include women and immigrants in the exhibition corresponds to the objective of hiring a certain percentage of them into the military service. In accordance with the representation criteria, the project group came up with four women to include on a total of thirty military lives, representative according to military employee statistics, of about five percent. Staarman agrees that women’s history is important but argues that even though the criteria for composing the exhibition are theoretically understandable, they are difficult to carry out. Staarman adds that, “it is all good, but it has to actually correspond with the available collection. That is why I have tried to slightly move away from this matrix, since it is very limiting. I, for me, have started to consider it more as a flexible framework, as a means to check that there are bits and pieces of everything in the
exhibition.”41 Even though the objects for presenting women’s history are not readily available, adding a certain percentage of women remains an important aspect of the ‘military in the spotlights’ exhibition at the National Military Museum. But what the curators do not seem to realize is that representing the number of women that are currently serving in the military does not automatically create meaningful histories. For women dealt with war in many different ways throughout history.
Also, when we look more closely at the women that were selected for the ‘military in the spotlights’ section, it seems the museum’s take on personal stories that are suitable for the exhibition is too limiting because ordinary stories that cover mundane day-to-day experiences are eliminated. Just like in the ‘1001 women in Dutch history’ exhibition, this creates a fragmented presentation of history. Without the social context of women’s stories, it is difficult to understand their road to being accepted into military positions. However, according to Staarman, extraordinary stories are the most compelling and therefore the most interesting to museum visitors. The four
40 Brandon, ‘Looking for the total woman in wartime’, 113. 41 Staarman (5 July 2013). Personal interview.
women that the curators selected all had extraordinary experiences during their military lives. Jos Mulder-Gemmeke was a spy who fought in England and came back to be a resistance fighter in the Netherlands during WWII and Manja Blok was the first female F16 pilot in the Netherlands. Out of four stories in total, none are about nurses or cooks or common female soldiers, which actually make up the majority of women’s stories.
The issue, according to Staarman, is whether visitors are interested in stories of common people’s lives. He underlines this with an example, “in our politically-correct matrix we have added a marine officer. A very common man. He is in there because we needed more navy people. This guy really does not have that much to say. But by including him, we will be able to say that we stick to our matrix. But I can predict that the average visitor will think, ‘this is a boring story’. That is why we keep looking for the best, most exciting stories.”42 According to Staarman, the “politically correct” percentages that were imposed on the museum by the Ministry, forced the curators to include ordinary people’s stories. By emphasizing that these numbers represent political correctness, he seems to disagree with the Ministry’s approach. Actually, both standpoints are wrong. The Ministry should not impose percentages for social inclusion because simply adding numbers of women or immigrants does not guarantee representative stories to be told. On the other hand, Staarman should let go of the idea that ordinary stories have nothing to contribute to the exhibition. He is making assumptions about the interests of the museum visitors. To hear about soldiers’ day to day experiences can be very moving. They often missed their homes, families and loved-ones. They were in a different environment and they had to fight in battles, and kill people. It is very interesting to learn how these common experiences affected different people. And by only looking for exciting narratives, the exhibition runs the risk of glamorizing war. When Staarman suggests that a marine officer really does not have ‘that much to say’, he may be referring to thrilling stories but if you dig a little deeper, you might find that his banal experiences in the military affected him in ways that can add value to a museum exhibition and to people’s understanding of wartime experience. Explaining to the visitors how women experienced military life can also be very compelling because of the prejudices they faced. However, in the National Military Museum, it is mostly extraordinary experiences that are highlighted.
In June 2012, the former Dutch Army Museum set up a trial exhibition of ‘military in the spotlights’ and conducted a survey. The outcome seems to confirm Staarman’s statements, as the
report from the survey concluded that visitors were only interested in the stories if they were exciting or compelling.43 The goal of the survey was to discover what the wishes and needs of
different types of visitors to the museum are with regards to the ‘military in the spotlights’ exhibition part. The questioned people were random visitors who visited during the Christmas holidays, as well as regular visitors, museum professionals, and people from the air force. Unsurprisingly, different target groups had different wishes. A striking example were the reactions to the story of officer Lucas Roelfsema, who was sent on a mission to Albania in 1914 and kept a personal diary. The essence of the story is that he eventually took his own life because of his love for a young unwedded mother (the report containing the results of the survey did not specify the reason why the soldier commits suicide). Most of the visitors stated that they thought this was an appealing story because of the personal drama. However, the museum professionals as well as some of the regular visitors said the story was inappropriate because the emphasis lies on personal drama rather than military life. This indicates that the museum professionals and some of the regular visitors, who are presumably well acquainted with the museum, are still focused on a traditional male-dominated perception of war and the military. However, most visitors did appreciate the personal storyline. Women’s history can thus also be included in other ways, for example the inclusion of soldiers’ wives, mothers and sisters.
Another example is a lawyer who was involved in the Uruzgan mission in 2007 and 2008. The curators set up a replica of his lodging for the trial exhibition, to give a sense of what his daily experiences were. This set-up was least appealing to the visitors because it dealt with recent events. Furthermore, according to the air force group and the regular visitors, the lodging was not accurately presented. The museum professionals stated that it was a good combination of objects, personal touches and content. But some of them argued that it was too dull, because of a lack of interaction and the static presentation of the lodging. The report concluded that, “stories of military in the field are appreciated more than stories of people with a governmental position.” However, instead of concluding that the person was too dull, the report may look at the way his story was portrayed. The set-up was more about his surroundings, rather than about the content of his work which may have been more exciting than it seems on the outset. The curators could have gotten more out of his story if they had focused in more detail on exciting aspects of this man’s job. The fact that the people held so tightly to the experience of military on the battlefield again confirms Staarmans statement that visitors are more interested in exciting stories. The report stated one of the responses from a
43 Deborah Mulder and Nienke Heester, ‘Report of research trial exhibition ‘military in the spotlights’ (June 2012), Roelfsema.
museum professional, “an experience with a lot of blood and realistic things, makes it more realistic and interesting.”44 But if curators would focus on telling ordinary people’s stories in a compelling, more personal way to make them more exciting, these stories will appeal to visitors nonetheless and furthermore add to public understanding of social issues in a historical perspective.
For a long time, it was exceptional for women to be accepted into the armed forces. The achievements of women like Manja Blok, the first female F16 pilot, were a great contribution to women’s emancipation in the military. However, her story is measured by masculine standards of what is exciting. Women who became military nurses or cooks also struggled to be accepted in a man’s world. Their stories can be just as compelling, because of the way these women fought against tradition, convention and prejudice. Kate Adie aptly formulated this point in her 2003 review of the ‘Women and war’ exhibition when she said that, “unless we remember the prejudices women faced, we cannot fully appreciate their extraordinary wartime achievements. Despite the lack of
encouragement and the fusty behaviour of officials who objected to women’s presence in shipyards, munitions factories and chemical works, women proved that, given the opportunity, they were more than capable of doing a man’s job – work for which they were paid, at most, only two-thirds of men’s wages.”45 What made the ‘Women and war’ exhibition compelling was the focus on social
inequalities that ordinary women faced.
According to Staarman, when ordinary people experience something special, they can still be identified with because they do not differ so much from ordinary people in other aspects of their life. These ordinary people (the soldiers), experience extraordinary things. A chief general does not experience extraordinary things often, because he sits behind a desk. Staarman adds, “on the battlefield, where extraordinary things happen, are soldiers. Ordinary people experiencing
extraordinary things, that is the clue. Not ordinary people experiencing ordinary things. Manja Blok is also just the girl next door.”46 Here, Staarman connects ordinary people to extraordinary events, stating that their identity as ordinary people makes them easy to identify with.
However, to fully capture the meaning of women’s wartime experiences, museum visitors need to also be aware of the position of women in society. Stories about heroines can contribute to the visitor’s understanding, when their exceptional stories are measured with wider social events. In their historical analysis of Florence Nightingale, Geertje Mak and Berteke Waaldijk state that women
44
Mulder and Heester, ‘Report of research trial exhibition’, 17. 45 Adie, ‘The home front’, 41.
had been nursing and caring at home for decades, which explains, along with the changing political climate in England during the second half of the nineteenth century and Nightingale’s rising
awareness of citizenship, her actions as a result of an altering society. Nightingale’s story, in Mak and Waaldijk’s analysis, is not just about one exceptional woman but about the position of women in society as a whole. The private sphere in which women usually operated, became more intertwined with the public sphere and Nightingale profited greatly from it. England made an important shift as the government got more involved in taking care of its population, by spending money on shelters for poor people and on other initiatives to secure social welfare. Women already played an important role in social issues, because as heads of the household they were used to caring for others. In this period of transition they started taking on an authoritative voice in areas that had before been seen as women’s domains, like caring for the sick and poor. Nightingale joined a
masculine discourse by claiming a professionalism in the public domain for nursing, to be carried out by women. Even though her story is exceptional, Mak and Waaldijk show that Nightingale was not a lone actor and that adding a gendered analysis opens up richer history and a broader scope on the position of women.47
To open up a broader scope on women’s military history in the National Military Museum, issues of traditional gender roles within the institution also need to be discussed. There is a stark divide between an exclusively male collection department and an exclusively female education department, which, according to Staarman, creates uneven collections and exhibitions. He explains that, “collecting for the military museum is currently a job of ‘hobbyists’, we are historians but our hobby is military history. The way a collection turns out is very much dependent on people and personal preferences.”48 The consequence is that the items they collect are objects that typically interest men with a traditional view of military history, such as weapons. These objects bear no specific witness of a female presence in the armed forces. Staarman acknowledges that this
collecting method limits the possibilities of creating versatile, gender-based exhibitions. As a strategy to create more balance in the collection, Staarman suggests putting a woman in charge of so-called “women’s items”. He argues that leaving a woman in charge of the collection department for about four to five years and not get involved in her work will balance out the collection. He adds that, “when you try to look at the subject from another point of view, it is very obvious and useful to have
47
Geertje Mak and Berteke Waaldijk, ‘Gender, history and the politics of Florence Nightingale’ in: Rosemarie Buikema, Doing gender in media, art and culture (London 2009), 212-221.
