Antidote to anarchy: the Matilda Joslyn Gage House as a site of social justice dialogue

ABSTRACT

Responding to Franklin Vagnone and Deborah Ryan’s 2016 call for historic houses across the nation to change – to embrace anarchy – in order to ensure survival, this paper presents the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center (Fayetteville, NY) as a case study embodying an “antidote to anarchy.” In her home, this women’s rights activist is brought to life through her ideas, rather than solely her life events and personal possessions. The history presented, while historically accurate and authentic, is simultaneously inclusive and thought-provoking – creating a site of civic engagement and reflection. Throughout, the Gage house upsets traditional expectations of museum comportment in its encouragement of dialogue, its “disrespect” for artifacts, and its role as a site of activism as well as of history. The Gage home truly demonstrates how historic house museums have the potential to become important centers for cultural discourse, reverberating with contemporary audiences in innovative new ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Historic Houses
• museum interpretation
• women’s rights
• abolition
• Haudenosaunee

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that the history of Gage’s life presented here draws on information learned via both museum text panels as well as conversations with Director, Sally Roesch-Wagner over the course of 7 years.

2 Visitors to the Gage home consist of a small number of “drop-ins” per week, and the vast majority are groups of various sorts that pre-book their visits with a volunteer guide – Scout troops, school groups, university classes etc.

3 Note that at the time of this paper, there are only two museum staff members and a small number of community volunteers who give pre-booked tours.

4 And, more broadly, the relevance of struggling historic house museums in general.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Stokes-Rees

Emily Stokes-Rees is Director of the School of Design and the Iris Magidson Endowed Professor of Design Leadership at Syracuse University. In addition to holding a doctorate in Material Anthropology, Emily is a museum professional with close to twenty years of experience in a variety of positions, from exhibition development and interpretation to education and collections management. Her research centers, broadly, on how museums and their collections might act as agents for social change. Recent publications include a book on postcolonial museums in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019) and a number of journal articles on museums in Japan, Macau, and Canada. Emily has most recently taught courses on cultural heritage preservation, curatorship, and interpretation for the Graduate Program in Museum Studies – she loves all the hands-on, creative aspects of what she does, and treasures every moment spent working with collections both in the classroom and the gallery.