Women's History/Public History—: Where the Twain Meet

Abstract

The Women's Heritage Museum (WHM), based in Palo Alto, California, calls itself a museum-without-walls. The organization's goals and methods are those of a museum. Its purpose now is to acquire a buA¼ding that wUl remove waUs part of name. The museum incorporated in February 1985. One of its three originators continues to work fuU time as executive diredor (for expenses and without compensation until last year). New and long-standing volun- teers and donors help in myriad and diverse efforts that cause an enterprise to flourish. Corporations, foundations, and organizations funded an exhibit on suffrage and an abridgement of it for smaUer spaces and briefer occasions, a video series of seven interviews for pubtic access television, and various sirrdlar projeds. The museum also publishes quarterly a miniature newspaper about adivism in public educa- tion in women's history nationwide. The museum's board of directors derided at outset to engage in program work in order to buA¼d a constituency and to accomplish goals of organization even without physical appurtenances of a museum. This decision pushed group in direction of becoming sirrdlar to a very active historical sodety, but one that spedalizes in coUaboration. For example, WHM and Oakland Museum celebrated National Women's History Month together, sponsoring a talk and stide presentation by curator of an exhibit, Women and American Railroading, that wA¼l premiere July through December 1990 at State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. A more extensive coUaboration resulted in California Woman Suffrage, 1870-1911 exhibit, aeated by WHM and History Center at De Anza Community CoUege in Cupertino. Since exhibit's opening in 1986 for seventy-fifth anniversary of women's gaining equal voting rights, this eight-panel exhibit has been booked at State Capitol for three successive years and at five other locations, including National Women's HaU of Fame in Seneca FaUs, New York. In its home community of Palo Alto, WHM undertook preserva- tion for pubtic education of house of Juana Briones y Tapia de Miranda (1802-1889), a designated by one historian as the preeminent woman of colonial history.1 An agreement based on more than two years of research and negotiation culminated in limited legal historic