The jacket description for Kate Hill's Women and Museums, 1850–1914 identifies it as “the first attempt to recover the entirety of women's contribution to British museums in the period 1850–1914.” This claim about “entirety” captures well the reader's encyclopedic experience here. In clearly organized chapters, Hill's study moves through the various roles women played in the burgeoning world of Victorian and Edwardian museology: women were assistants, volunteers, curators, housekeepers, popularizers and educators, donors and vendors, visitors, and patrons. Hill's interest concerns how women changed the material practices of museums, a story of influence and impact that has—she argues—gone largely untold in scholarship on museums and culture. Crucial to Hill's argument is the conception of the museum as a “distributed institution.” Scholars writing on the museum typically begin by defining their target institution: was it a temple, people's university, fun house, world's fair, or mausoleum? For Hill, the distributed museum accomplishes its cultural work by means of networked operations involving objects and people going in and out of its walls—demarcations that are simultaneously fortified and porous. A network's aleatory design suits well what Hill sees as the constantly shifting nature of women's relationship to museums, a distributed institution that invites them and their influence inside and then sends them back out again, to continue the work of the museum beyond its walls.

Hill tests the inside-outside binary that, despite its usefulness to her argument, dissolves upon closer inspection due to the nature of a network's operations. Hill acknowledges that it is important to note the ways museum culture reified women's position as outside, as peripheral. Even when women were “invited” inside, Hill explains, there were strategies and professional expectations in place that kept women in constrained roles (in a kind of outsider's space within the inside—that is, volunteerism, charity work, or the largely invisible role of patron's wife). Another generative complicating move is Hill's treatment of “home” versus “museum.” Conventionally seen as antitheses, the concepts of home and museum blend for Hill, as, for example, she explores women's vital role in inculcating in children at home the importance of collecting as a hobby, and, on the other hand, she points to museums’ aims to be themselves “home-like,” welcoming and nurturing. The educative mission of nineteenth-century museums typically called upon women as teachers. Indeed, women in museums were often seen as a desirable presence that legitimated the reputation of a museum. Several of Hill's most fascinating sections explore how the home made its way into museums by way of donations, memorial gifts, legacies, emergent disciplines, and crafts once thought to be at home in the nuclear family home rather than in the public spaces of display. Hill explains how authenticity, in great demand within late-century museum display, was often credentialed by means of ties to the home. Here the turn-of-the-century interest in home museums—the homes of the past as they themselves became worthy of “collecting” and “exhibiting”—is a particularly potent iteration of the museum's intimacy with the domestic sphere.

Hill's contention that museums afforded women opportunities even as they fought against the incursion of women is best explored in the many specifics that fill her book, the fruits of assiduous archival mining. Provincial museums in England provide Hill with her preferred case studies, and the book is soon populated by many influential women that shaped the material practices of museums. Appropriately, Hill begins the book at the granular level, with a specific female, Beatrix Potter, returning from an 1896 visit to the British Museum. Many other figures follow in her steps in the pages of Hill's book: the Davies sisters, Nina Layard, and Hilda Petrie. Hill's cast of agents is wide, ranging from women who behaved badly in museums to Ruskin's exemplary female curators. The parts and bits of Hill's historical retrieval effect a more powerful whole, as Hill works by means of a “collective biography”—a network of women but also a network of objects … often donated by, curated by, discovered by, seen by women. In similar fashion, Hill offers up “object biographies” that follow the routes museum objects take. As she claims, objects often bring their stories with them. Here Hill's analysis of textiles, relics, and souvenirs is particularly rich. Hill's key strategies that pivot on the distributed museum, the blending of inside and outside, public and private, and the collective biographies of networked people and objects bring her subject to life.

For this reader, the most interesting section concerned women's “acquisition events” and how women shaped both knowledge and affect. Hill's theorizing work on the potency of affect (nostalgia, memory, sensation) in museology is particularly intriguing, especially as affect was customarily a woman's province. Women's ascendancy in the new human sciences, archaeology and anthropology—especially their key role in the pop cultural sensation of Egyptology—give the book its freshest material. Though the following chapter on Ruskinian museology is meant to provide the book's culminating analysis, this penultimate chapter with its less obvious conclusions is more compelling.

Women and Museums will interest scholars in museum studies as well as those in gender studies and British culture studies more broadly. Hill tills the exciting territory of the global and local, though here the book is a bit confusing. While Hill indicates that her focus is England with the occasional foray to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, there are recurring references to the United States. And the provinces and the city seem largely interchangeable. More intentionality about locale would have only enriched the texture of Hill's analysis. But Hill's main objective is successfully realized: to demonstrate the complex story of modernity by examining how the cultural institution of the museum was shaped by women. For Hill, the museum is a place for dialogue, where norms are revised as well as asserted—a stage for negotiating what and who is a citizen. A few of Hill's conclusions become repetitive, and certain names keep showing up; that might be due in part to the book's chapter design. A reader might welcome a more extended treatment of one of the women profiled here, to diversify the argument's main strategy of accretion, though, admittedly, such a move would counter Hill's collective biography methodology that reveals the distributed museum's vibrant network of human figures and material things.