A Room of Their Own

Women's Home Museums Revealed"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story."
-Homer

The word museum originated from the ancient Greek word that denoted "place of the Muses." The nine Muses were the offspring of Zeus-who wasn't?-and Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory. Indeed, museums are the repositories of memories, of ancient civilization, of the apogee of artistry.

Everyone has heard of the major museums whose stories are as intriguing as the works they display: Paris's Louvre, London's National Gallery, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between these three iconic institutions, twenty million visitors walk their halls, approximately the same number as people living in Beijing. But what about the galleries that do not display canvases bearing the signatures of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Caravaggio, or Gentileschi?

Curiosity about the daily lives of the famous draws us to the places they called home. A Room of Their Own is an investigation into museums of a kind sometimes referred to as memory museums, dedicated to fascinating women whose lives left indelible fingerprints on history. As these landmarks are situated in their subjects' homes, rather than passively gazing at paintings with accompanying brass plaques, visitors undergo a more intimate experience. Upon entering their thresholds, one encounters a three-dimensional diary with artifacts that comprised their everyday lives: furniture, photographs, and letters. Even the most mundane of objects takes on a magical realism, as they were the possessions of ladies of legend. The rooms where their residents lived serve as a confessional; here they laughed, mourned, and created. For those with a nod to the mystical, their ghostly chatelaines serve as guides. House museums are Pied Pipers to the curious. Walking where historic figures once trod presents the opportunity to hear the scratching of Emily Brontë's quill in her Haworth Parsonage, listen to an aria in Édith Piaf's

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Anne Hathaway's Cottage (opened 1892)
Chapter 2: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (opened 1903)
Chapter 3: Orchard House (opened 1912)
Chapter 4: Lyme Regis (opened 1921)
Chapter 5: Winchester Mystery House (opened 1922)
Chapter 6: Brontë Parsonage Museum (opened 1928)
Chapter 7: The Betsy Ross House (opened 1937)
Chapter 8: Marbacka (opened 1940)
Chapter 9: The Susan B. Anthony Museum & House (opened 1945)
Chapter 10: Hill Top (opened 1946)
Chapter 11: Jane Austen's House Museum (opened 1947)
Chapter 12: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (opened 1951)
Chapter 13: Ivy Green (opened 1954)
Chapter 14: Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace (opened 1956)
Chapter 15: Museo Frida Kahlo Museum (opened 1958)
Chapter 16: The Anne Frank House (opened 1960)
Chapter 17: Carry Nation House (opened 1961)
Chapter 18: Maria Sklodowska Curie Museum (opened 1967)
Chapter 19: The Musée Édith Piaf Museum (opened 1967)
Chapter 20: Hillwood House (opened 1977)
Chapter 21: May McLeod Bethune Council House (opened 1979)
Chapter 22: Monk's House (opened 1980)
Chapter 23: Johanna Spyri Museum (opened 1981)
Chapter 24: The Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum (opened 1984)
Chapter 25: Alice Austen Museum (opened 1985)
Chapter 26: Farley Farm (opened 1987)
Chapter 27: The Golda Meir House Museum (opened 1995)
Chapter 28: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House (opened 1996)
Chapter 29: The Lizzie Borden House (opened 1996)
Chapter 30: The Margaret Mitchell House (opened 1997)
Chapter 31: The Princess Dianna Museum (opened 1998)
Chapter 32: The Emily Dickinson Museum (opened 2003)
Chapter 33: Greenway House (opened 2003)
Chapter 34: The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts (opened 2005)
Chapter 35: Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation (opened 2010)
Chapter 36: The Marian Anderson Historical Residence Museum (opened 2011)
Chapter 37: The Belmont-Paul; Women's Equality National Monument (opened 2016)


Acknowledgments
About the Author

Marlene Wagman-Geller is a bestselling author known for her work in writing about phenomenal women and their impact on civilization. Since publishing her debut book in 2008, she has gone on to write popular feminist books such as Still I Rise, Women of Means, and Women Who Launch, which were reviewed by The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Wagman-Geller currently lives in sunny San Diego with her husband and Persian cat, and teaches English when not writing her next book about famous women in history.

A native of New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life," in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale.

Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose "Domestic Affairs" column appeared in over fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more, and a longtime performer with The Moth.

Maynard is the author of seventeen books, including the novel To Die For and the bestselling memoir, At Home in the World-translated into sixteen languages. Her novel, To Die For was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry for a film directed by Gus Van Sant, in which Joyce can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman's lawyer. Her novel Labor Day was adapted and directed by Jason Reitman for a film starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, to whom Joyce offered instruction for making the pie that appeared in a crucial scene in the film.

The mother of three grown children, Maynard runs workshops in memoir at her home in Lafayette, California. In 2002 she founded The Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where she hosts a weeklong workshop in personal storytelling every winter. She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

"The book you hold in your hands is about the places where women of accomplishment (mostly renown and in one or two instances, infamy) have not only lived but worked. This has to do not only with their desks and writing spaces of course (if they were writers; some whose spaces are explored here were not) but with the whole environment of the houses in which they carried on their lives."
-Joyce Maynard, author of Count the Ways