Influential Women of the CMA: Staff

Main pages:

Individual women:

Perhaps the largest and most diverse category, female staff members have consistently kept the museum running each and every day. Because this category is so large, it's impossible to acknowledge every woman who has worked at the museum and even harder to choose who should be acknowledged. It is also difficult to acknowledge the women in "unseen" positions. There is documentation on women who became curators or department heads, but hardly any, if any at all, documents exist acknowledging the women in "blue-collar" jobs at the museum. This is also an important gap to acknowledge especially considering the continuing focus on diversity within the museum.

Historically women that occupied "white-collar" positions would not be acknowledged for their work either. These women would be employed in jobs like secretaries or assistants. Because of the nature of these positions, their work would be associated with or credited to the man they worked for. Fortunately, there was a shift where these positions would then allow for women start their career in the museum and lead to a position with more acknowledgement. Even with this acknowledgement, women in the arts, whether an artist, historian, or the like, were limited to departments and subjects not seen as "fine art." Rather than working with Renaissance paintings, they would work in curatorial departments like Decorative Arts, Textiles, Prints and Drawings or others like Education or the Library. Though these are all important fields, they are typically female dominated even to this day.

On this landing page, there are resources on women working in museums both historically and in the present. Much of the existing literature focuses primarily or exclusively on women with a formal education.