Maids, Tenants, and Curators: Domestic Labor and New England’s House Museums

This article explores the role of domestic workers and domestic labor in the administration, preservation, and interpretation of historic house museums in New England in the twentieth century. Whereas previous scholarship has framed house museums as a new kind of institution, this article argues instead that the material and spatial conditions of historic house museums enabled early museum administrators to adapt preexisting systems of domestic labor to historic site administration. Domestic workers thus emerged as some of the earliest frontline staff at house museums responsible for the care, display, and interpretation of material culture at these sites. To explore this phenomenon, this article examines the work of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and its founder, William Sumner Appleton, who made the employment of domestic workers a matter of administrative policy for the organization in the early twentieth century. The article concludes at the end of the twentieth century, when professionalization in public history and historic preservation encouraged many museum administrators to transition house museums back into private homes where homeowners assumed domestic housekeeping responsibilities. Ultimately, this article traces an alternative origin story for the labor systems underpinning the public history workplace by foregrounding the material and architectural conditions of house museums.