Whenever I travel, I try to visit historic sites that interpret women’s history. This summer, while traveling through New England, I had the opportunity to visit six historic house museums associated with remarkable women: the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the Emily Dickinson Museum, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, the House of the Seven Gables, Historic Deerfield’s Frary House, and the Florence Griswold Museum.

Years of visiting historic sites have led me to pay as much attention to how museums interpret history as to the history itself. I rarely experience these tours simply as a visitor. I find myself paying attention to the choices guides make, the stories they emphasize, the evidence they use, and the ways they connect people to place. Each museum approached interpretation differently, reflecting its own mission, history, and collections.

The Emily Dickinson Homestead was one of the strongest examples. Rather than treating the house as the place where Dickinson happened to live, the guide used each room to explore her intellectual life. Her poetry, education, family relationships, and creative choices were woven together through the spaces of the house. By the end of the tour, I wanted to read more Emily Dickinson—not because I felt I should, but because the interpretation had made me curious about the remarkable mind behind the poems.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House took a similarly thoughtful approach while reaching a different conclusion. Instead of focusing exclusively on Louisa, the tour revealed an entire household alive with writing, theater, art, education, reform, and conversation. The house demonstrated that Little Women did not emerge from the imagination of an isolated writer but from the creative life of an extraordinary family. The rooms themselves became evidence of that larger story.

Continue reading →