Women and the making of museums and galleries: histories, institutions, and hidden labour

This introduction situates the special issue Women and the Making of Museums and Galleries: Histories, Institutions, and Hidden Labour within the growing international scholarship on women’s roles in museums, galleries, and heritage institutions. Developed from papers first presented at the National Gallery’s Women and the Arts Forum Conference in 2025, ‘Women and the Making of Museums and Galleries’, the volume examines women’s contributions to museums and galleries from the nineteenth century to the present day across professional, technical, and voluntary roles, including curatorial practice, conservation, photography, administration, cleaning, collecting, and philanthropy. It argues that recovering these histories requires more than restoring overlooked individuals to institutional narratives: it also demands a reconsideration of the gendered structures through which museums have historically constructed authority, professional status, and institutional memory. The introduction places the volume within recent scholarship and institutional initiatives in Britain and internationally concerned with recovering women’s contributions to, and influence on, museums and galleries. It explores the methodological challenges of reconstructing women’s institutional histories from archival records that have frequently rendered their work partial or invisible, while highlighting the rich range of sources employed throughout the volume. It also identifies the principal themes that connect the essays, including museum labour, curatorial practice, collecting and philanthropy, institutional authority, and the recovery of women’s histories. The Introduction argues that by bringing these case studies into dialogue, the special issue enriches understanding of museum histories, contributes to wider debates about gender, labour, professionalisation, and cultural authority, and provides a framework for future comparative and transnational research.