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Public History By Women: Explorers Retrospective

Author:  Tamsin Martin, student majoring in Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. This piece was written on Darug Land.


Anna Adamek (Director of the Curatorial Division at Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation) and Emily Gann (Curator at Ingenium) spoke at this IFPH Explorers event about Public History Made by Women.

Poster for an IFPH Explorers event with Anna Adamek and Emily Gann called "Public History Made By Women"

IFPH Explorers Poster

This event took place in July 2021, I was reminded of the relevance of this topic during March and Women’s History Month, with the theme “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.” Anna Adamek and Emily Gann both embody this subject: they are women who tell our stories, working in museums and on exhibitions. Adamek’s presentation, “The more it changes…,” recounted her decades of experience in the public history sector, thinking about how women are treated and how they interact with research projects and museum collections. Gann’s presentation, “What does a feminist collection look like?,” covered her experience working with museum collections to curate, collect, and form stories for public presentation that centre female stories and include feminist values.

Both of these presentations allowed us to gain an interesting insight into the experiences of women in public history. Adamek’s discussion displayed a progression in how she has experienced acceptance and legitimacy in the field. At Ingenium, she has worked in the natural resources department, a historically male dominated field of study. She told the story of herself as a young woman, beginning to work in research and curatorship. She was often dismissed in favour of male colleagues, even in favour of her male assistant. As she got older, she shifted from being dismissed to being questioned at every move about her knowledge or qualifications. She stated that it was only after years of experience and “moving up” that she became and felt fully respected. Adamek also spoke about how she often saw research projects about female history get rejected at the first hurdle. This is why, in her career, she has tried to ensure that these perspectives are being considered and researched. Adamek’s perspective on the ways in which the field has changed over the years is very valuable. Something that I think resonates with anyone who has had to fight for approval in a professional setting is her argument that having to fight for agency and respect within the public history sector has led to a decrease in the ability to focus productively on research and projects. I appreciate Adamek saying that while her workforce is currently gender balanced in terms of having equal male and female voices, she believes that the field has further to go in centering nonbinary and other 2SLGBTQIA+ voices in the future. That’s why the name of her presentation is so poignant: the more the field has changed to allow for the visibility of women, the more it has stayed the same in terms of gender-based discrimination, just focused towards a different group.

Gann’s contribution to this event provided an interesting insight into how museum collections are formed, and how to do that with women’s stories in mind. Using her experience working in collections that centre technology, she mentioned the way in which it is entwined with gender and how objects can show gendered assumptions in their use and design. She also brought valuable insight into how feminist theory and inclusion can be brought into studying current collections and building future ones, through consideration of how women had interacted with the objects already in collections and what those represented about female life, while also considering female perspectives in the collection of new objects. She talked about how there are gaps in museum collections, which need to be filled with objects that relate to and consider underrepresented perspectives. This, she said, could be completed by seeking out specific artefacts. However, it can be a narrow approach that ultimately has the potential to create ‘gender silos,’ where representations of gender in collections only appear in narrow fields. While acquisition methods have changed to consider varied perspectives, the current methods will inevitably change in the future. Gann reminds listeners that change is a good thing, as it represents dynamic social attitudes and inclusive collections.

One of the most valuable things about this event is that it allowed us to listen firsthand to women talking about using their positions as curators to tell the stories of women in history. These are perspectives and experiences that have been neglected and remind us that having women in the field pushing these narratives forward is a sign of how it has evolved. I did appreciate how both Adamek and Gann brought up how the field has further to come, especially in prioritising non-binary and other 2SLGBTQIA+ voices.

I believe that the key takeaway from this event was the message that it is important to present and prioritise female voices, stories and experiences, but we shouldn’t stop there. They both agree that this is a small step forwards in a long path towards presenting a diverse and varied human history, representing all people. Adamek’s advice for young women starting out in public history is also an important reminder: don’t ever try to justify yourself to others; you are just as qualified as everyone else.


Tamsin Martin is in her final year of Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Modern History at Macquarie University. Her plan after graduation is to continue onto higher level study, focusing on researching the gay rights movement of the 1970s, and to enter museum and research work.

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bridging Editor (May 29, 2023). Public History By Women: Explorers Retrospective. IFPH-FIHP. Retrieved February 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pvqk


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