The Jaffer-Humphreys Test: A Bechdel for the Museum World

A guest post by the wonderful Laura Humphreys (@tweetingbogart) 

I recently spent two years working on the Exploration Wing Galleries at Royal Museums Greenwich (Opening later in 2018). Walking back from a meeting, my colleague Aaron (Jaffer, Curator of World History & Cultures) and I were chatting about issues of representation, and particularly, of women. Wandering through the National Maritime Museum’s sprawling Neptune Hall, we were continuing a conversation which had started in the meeting: does Queen Elizabeth I represent women?

YAAAAAAAAS, KWEEEN! 

The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, Royal Museums Greenwich

On the one hand, of course; she’s an imposing figure in our history, who oversaw a ‘Golden Age’ despite the best efforts of her father and the constraints of her time. But on the other hand, she was operating in a patrilineal structure, and the beneficiary of unimaginable inherited wealth, power, and status.  Does she almost… not count?  

Of course she counts, but she’s not enough. It’s a problem reminiscent of the ‘Strong Female Lead’ in films; there are many great films with an amazing lead female character who dominates the screen. However, sometimes those films don’t feel particularly feminist, or even equal, and the best way to articulate that is the infamous Bechdel Test.

The birth of the Bechdel Test, from Dykes to Watch Out For. © Alison Bechdel, 1985.

Based on a comic from Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel in 1985, the Bechdel Test provides a simple assessment for the level of female participation in a film/ book/ show. It asks these questions:

1. Are there at least two female characters?
2. Do two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man?

If the answer to both is yes, you’re in luck: your film has passed the Bechdel Test! It’s a low bar, right?

Not low enough, it seems. Many films don’t fulfil this most basic of requirements. Toy Story doesn’t pass. The Godfather doesn’t pass. Citizen Kane doesn’t pass. 7 out of 8 Harry Potter films don’t pass (interestingly ALL the books do… but that’s another blog entirely). And nowhere in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit films is there a passing conversation. And as for films with that Strong Female Lead™? Run Lola Run, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Blind Side all fail. Even Alien only passes if you assume the titular Alien isn’t a bloke.

So, in a brazen act of plagiarism, we decided it was time Museums had their own version, to articulate why cursory nods to Queens and wives are not good enough. Enter the Jaffer-Humphreys Test! When visiting (or preferably, developing) a museum exhibition or gallery, ask yourself these two questions:

1. Are there at least two women ‘on display’ in this gallery?
This doesn’t need to be photographs or paintings of women – it needs to recognise the role of women in the history of a place/ industry/ event/ movement. There are very few legitimate cases where women don’t belong in a gallery narrative – so if they aren’t there, someone isn’t doing their job.

Florence goddamn Nightingale pioneered the use of statistical analysis and visual representation of information to save lives.

Nightingale’s Polar Area Diagram, Public Domain.

The Winton Gallery of Mathematics at the Science Museum is a good example; Florence Nightingale’s pioneering use of statistics and Ada Lovelace’s l33t computer programming skills are central stories, in a gallery which celebrates the sweeping geometrical architecture of the late Zaha Hadid. There aren’t images of any of these women, because there don’t need to be – they have parity with their male counterparts.

2. Are they presented in terms of their relationship to a man?

What we’re looking to avoid here is “Ethel was the wife of Great White Man who takes up 95% of the gallery – here is her glove” in a display case near the exit. Mothers, daughters, wives, and mistresses have long been hastily co-opted into a gallery because someone noticed in the final draft that there weren’t any women. This women-as-historical-footnote approach is tokenistic and reactionary, and it needs to get in the sea.

BUT – these women can, and should, be presented as whole beings in their own right. A good example would be Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity which was on display at the National Maritime Museum 2016-2017.

Emma Hamilton, plotting the downfall of the patriarchy

Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) by George Romney, Royal Museums Greenwich

Hamilton was famously Nelson’s mistress, and has long been maligned as a homewrecker and a distracter of one of our national heroes. This exhibition aimed to portray Hamilton as a political and cultural actor in her own right, a polymath and social influencer long before she ever clapped eyes on Nellyface. The reason the National Maritime Museum collections are rich in her belongings and archives is because she was his girlfriend, sure – but it’s what you DO with that stuff that counts. Even a superficial reading of Emma Hamilton takes you beyond the mistress narrative, and reveals one of the most spectacular humans in European history.

So, to pass the Jaffer-Humphreys Test you need at least two women, presented in their own right, in any gallery or exhibition. As with the Bechdel itself, the stark truth of the current situation lies in the reverse test. Can you think of a single film where two men DON’T talk about something other than a woman?! Almost unheard of.

And so – can you think of a museum gallery where there AREN’T two men, represented in their own right? Me neither.

Bout time we changed that, I reckon.

Another absolute belter from 1985. Not enough has changed.

The Jaffer-Humphreys Test: FAQs

OH CRAP. The exhibition I’m working on doesn’t pass the test! What do I DO?!

Calm down and take a breath, friend. It’s pretty bad that your exhibition doesn’t pass and you should really examine why that is, but you have realised in time and we are here to help! Firstly; women are 51% of the population, currently and historically, so numbers are on your side. Secondly, women are everywhere! You may have to look a bit harder, because we’re working with 2,000 years + of systemic sexism, but women are fierce and have left their mark on history.

For example: Are you struggling with 16^th & 17^th century maritime history, which women were nothing to do with? You’re in luck! That’s a lie – how about pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read? Or, the archaeological evidence from the HMS London disaster, which Samuel Pepys wrote about in his diary that shows women and children were on board? Or take a different approach to your sources, like the excellent Hannah Worthen, who is researching the petitions of women in the Civil War to the admiralty for aid to build a better picture of their lives as naval wives.

Archives, objects, and history itself are all deeply political. As boss scholars like Antoinette Burton, Jacques Derrida, and Miles Ogborn have all argued, archives and museums are political actors in their own right, and sometimes their silences speak louder than anything else. What is kept and what is binned is never an accident – and nor are the stories and voices you amplify.   

But, isn’t this a low bar still?

YUP. Supes low. Painfully low. But when the Jaffer-Humphreys Test was first presented, we asked a room of about 30 people – largely museum professionals – to think of a gallery they know well or have worked on, and apply the test. We asked everyone to raise their hands at the end if their gallery passed the test… and, nothing.

This is a tool to push people to recognise that representing women isn’t optional/ too hard/ irrelevant to their topic – it should be integral. Use this test as an indicator of the bare minimum – the job is far from finished at two women, but at least it has begun.

I work at a Natural History/ Geology/ obscure hand tools museum. We have no people, so we have no problem, right?

WRONG, my dude. Rebecca Machin has written about staggering gender bias in Natural History Displays, and there’s a whole book about women in Geology – if you’re just showing people rocks, you have a-whole-nother problem. And hey, did you know that the circular saw was invented by Tabitha Babbitt in 1815? No excuses – humans are an integral part of all museums; our relationship with objects and their history is what makes museums museums, not cupboards.

Does this test account for intersectional representations of women?

Nope – and that’s another reason it should be used with great care. This is one simple test for one facet of representation, but there are almost endless issues with how museums interpret histories and geographies of race, sexuality, health, wealth, and gender, to name but a few. We need to keep looking long and hard at what we say and display; and again, I point you in the direction of far smarter dudes than I, who have written extensively on this subject. And I invite you to mess with the test and come up with a better version!

Does this work for Art Galleries?

Errrr… not always. It does in some cases, and depends on how you apply it. Women are often artists, depicted in art, and generally a major part of the world. However, that doesn’t always translate to representation, so we should definitely be turning the eye of scrutiny towards art galleries. But it’s tricky; art doesn’t have to be figurative, so a Jackson Pollack or a Mondrian exhibition would mess with this test, for example.

I am a confirmed art idiot despite my best efforts, so I would encourage you to seek out the wonderful art historians, curators, and artists who write brilliant stuff about  this subject. They will have a much better plan!

Why does the man’s name come first in the test name?

Aaron & I first presented the Jaffer-Humphreys Test as part of a seminar we gave on developing permanent galleries (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galleries), which was delivered in an A-Z format. We had about 17 ideas for H, and not a sausage for J. So, not patriarchy, but pragmatism! You should go see the #SeaSem seminars by the way: they’re GREAT.

Do Ships Count?

No mate, they don’t. And if you’re still referring to ships (or any other inanimate object) as “she”, you’re more out of date than Lloyds of London. Try harder.

Guest Post: Alison Moulds on guest curating “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses”

Guest curating “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” at the Hunterian Museum
Alison Moulds (PhD candidate, University of Oxford)

Alison Moulds at the opening of her collaborative exhibition

This April saw the launch of my first-ever exhibition; working alongside the Hunterian Museum (at the Royal College of Surgeons of England) I helped to guest curate a series of displays that explores the history of vaccination from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its ubiquity in the present day.

My colleague Sally Frampton, a Postdoctoral Research Assistant, and I became involved with the exhibition through our wider research project, Constructing Scientific Communities. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it looks at citizen science in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, and is particularly interested in interrogating the public-professional divide in fields such as natural history and medicine. We’re partnered with other institutions, including the University of Leicester, Natural History Museum, Royal Society, and Royal College of Surgeons.

Given the focus of our project, when it came to creating the exhibition narrative, we were keen to look at the ways in which ordinary people have contributed to the history of vaccination. This included not only those who had a hand in its discovery – such as Benjamin Jesty, the Dorset farmer whose experiments with cowpox predated those of the GP Edward Jenner – but also those who protested against its usage. During the Victorian period vaccination was made compulsory through legislation, a landmark moment in the history of state public health, but also one which sparked widespread resistance. Our exhibition’s title “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” signals the way in which we see vaccination as a key site for interactions between medical professionals, individual patients, and the wider public. Pro- and anti-vaccination activities were equally important to us, though we knew a medical museum needed to engage with the scientific aspect as well as the social history.

Cruikshank's The Cowpox Tragedy (1812), Courtesy of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons

As newbies to the world of curating, one of the most exciting aspects for us was undoubtedly tracking down the objects for display. We decided early on that we wanted a diverse range of material, from ephemera to medical instruments, portraiture to film. One of our first ports of call was the Hunterian Museum’s own catalogue. Here we found papers belonging to Jenner, including personal correspondence and a draft manuscript of his inquiry into experiments with cowpox (1798). The Hunterian’s in-house collection also contained one of the earliest and most iconic satirical images about vaccination – George Cruikshank’s The Cowpox Tragedy (1812). All these items ended up on display.
We then started exploring other collections, including the Jenner Museum in Gloucestershire, the Gordon Museum of Pathology at King’s College London, and the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. Among the gems we discovered was an incredibly affecting set of photographs of smallpox patients from the early twentieth century, which show the devastating effects of the disease. These were objects found ‘behind the scenes’ at the Jenner Museum that we reproduced for the exhibition. Following the installation, seeing the way in which all our objects interact with one another in the space has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the exhibition becoming a reality.

The process of display wasn’t without its hurdles, however. There were anxieties about how to share the reproduced patient photos, as well as human specimens, sympathetically. We didn’t want their inclusion to seem gratuitous, but neither did we want to adopt a sanitised approach. We were committed to showing people the reality of the disease, which is all too easy to forget now it has been eradicated. We also experienced an eleventh-hour emergency when we discovered we didn’t have a suitable screen available to show a wonderful public health information video we’d tracked down at the Wellcome Library. Getting one installed in time was a huge relief, especially since Surprise Attack (1951) has proved immensely popular with visitors. A narrative of mild peril, the film depicts a young girl who contracts smallpox and a town responding with a mass vaccination campaign co-ordinated by the local Medical Officer of Health. One of its biggest draws is probably the fact it features John Le Mesurier, better known for his later role as Sergeant Arthur Wilson in Dad’s Army.

Bringing together such a wide range of objects wasn’t always easy and perhaps one of the biggest difficulties for us was constructing a coherent and accessible narrative about the history of vaccination around them. We hoped to give some sense of the chronology of vaccination but also tease out overarching themes along the way. We wanted to tackle the objects on display but also gesture towards other aspects of the debate. As academics, brevity isn’t always our strong suit and we had to be rigorous about slicing and dicing our beloved words into something that would work well for museum audiences. We also struggled with creating object labels where provenance wasn’t always clear or where it was protracted and confused!

Since our academic research usually sees us poring over weighty tomes on our own, often in a dusty archive somewhere, the collaborative aspect of exhibition work was something we really enjoyed. It enabled us to work not only together, but also with the Museum’s in-house curator (Bruce Simpson) and curators elsewhere, as well as archivists and librarians. We were also committed to promoting wider public engagement around the exhibition, and worked with the Hunterian’s Learning and Events Officer, Hayley Kruger, to organise a “Museums at Night” opening, complete with anti-vaccination songs, a screening of public health information videos from across the twentieth century, and a talk from Dr Richard Barnett, medical historian and author of The Sick Rose. It was great to watch people exploring the space and to hear their thoughts on the exhibition. Rarely does our work have such an immediate and widespread impact.

Alison Moulds is a second-year DPhil English Literature student at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Working as part of the AHRC-funded project “Constructing Scientific Communities”, and in partnership with the Royal College of Surgeons of England, she is researching the construction of the doctor-patient relationship and the formation of professional identity in nineteenth-century medical writing, including fiction by doctors. She previously undertook her MA Victorian Studies part-time at Birkbeck College, University of London while working full-time in health policy and public affairs. She is Peer Review Editor for the Victorian Network journal. She blogs at https://victorianclinic.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @alison_moulds.

“Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” runs from Tuesday 19 April to Saturday 17 September at the Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free admission.

Guest Post! Conservator as Curator: Joshua Reynolds at Wallace Collection

A few weeks ago we had a fantastic tour of the Wallace Collection's new exhibition on Joshua Reynolds from Alexandra Gent, the co-curator and conservator. I know right? Conservator and curator- what a great idea! So we asked Alex if she wouldn't mind sharing some of her experiences with you. We think her fantastic guest post lets you get up close and personal with Reynolds as well as revealing the ups and downs of international loans and getting technical in exhibition text! Enjoy...

Alex Gent gives us a peak behind the scenes!

I was really excited to be given the opportunity to co-curate the exhibition Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint with Lucy Davis and Mark Hallett. As conservator for the Reynolds Research Project I had spent several years examining the twelve paintings by Reynolds in the Wallace Collection. Working closely with the scientists at the National Gallery, I not only looked at the surface of the paintings (often in minute detail using a microscope) but also beneath the surface- exploring the layers of paint and varnish.  This process gave me a lot of time to think about Reynolds as an artist and the way he painted.  I think I got to know Reynolds the artist pretty well over this time. What makes him so fascinating to me is as much what he gets wrong and what he gets right. 

Reynolds, technique and conservation science

Through examining his paintings we were trying to unpick his technique and work out; what materials he used, what has changed and just why some of his pictures are so cracked and faded? There were a few things that struck me as really interesting about Reynolds’s technique as I examined the paintings from the Wallace Collection. The first was the production of multiple versions of a composition. I have always been captivated by unfinished paintings as they reveal an artist’s work in progress. So I was delighted to discover that there were unfinished oil sketches related to both the portrait of Mrs Hoare and Child and the portrait of Mrs Mary Robinson. These are slightly different in style from each other and presented interesting questions such as; what came first- the finished portrait or the sketch, and why were they made? 

Reynold's Mrs Robinson from Yale

In the case of another composition, the Strawberry Girl, the multiple versions are completed paintings but with slight variations. I was really excited when I first saw the X-ray image of the Wallace Collection painting as it showed it was originally more like the first variant, with a fringed headdress and hunched shoulders. This was especially revealing as I had read in James Northcote’s The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds that Reynolds had recommended working on two versions of a composition simultaneously; the technical analysis seemed to support the anecdote. 

The second was Reynolds’s use of drapery painters and assistants. I knew that Reynolds did use drapery painters, as was common in the 18th century. What was less well understood was that Reynolds finished off his paintings, adjusting the work of the drapery painter once it returned to his easel. For example the drapery in the portrait of the Duke of Queensberry, looks like the work of a drapery painter, however the X-ray image and the infrared reflectogram revealed changes to the costume, including the repositioning of the rows of spots on his ermine cape. Using other hands sped up the painting process but Reynolds was putting his stamp on the paintings before it left his studio, making changes and adding the finishing touches.

The Strawberry Girl

The third observation was that Reynolds did seem to learn from his mistakes but also he often changed his technique in ways that created new problems. The grey face of The Duke of Queensberry clearly illustrates the major defect in his early portraits- the fading of the red lake pigment he used to emulate a more naturalistic skin tone. The later portraits certainly don’t have this problem. But the later portraits are more prone to cracking caused by his increased use of varnish in his paint and the application of numerous paint layers. The challenge of the exhibition was to convey what we had discovered about Reynolds’s technique without overwhelming the paintings with technical information. We tried to do this by selecting paintings that would help illustrate his painting process.

Collaborative curation

For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of working on the exhibition was selecting the paintings we wanted to borrow. Throughout the project I had been in touch with conservators from other institutions who had undertaken investigation and treatment of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. They were all extremely generous with their time and sharing the results of their research. So it was great to be able to borrow paintings from Tate (The Age of Innocence), The Yale Center for British Art (Mrs Mary Robinson, Mrs Abbington as Miss Prue) and the National Portrait Gallery (Self-portrait shading Eyes) and draw on the results of recent technical analysis for the exhibition. Finalising the loans list also gave me an insight into the difficulties curators face when requests are rejected or the budget won’t quite stretch to another international loan (I promise to be more sympathetic in future!). 

Mrs Robinson from the Wallace Collection

I also really enjoyed working with my co-curators Lucy and Mark. I felt that curating the exhibition was a truly collaborative process, with each of us bringing a different set of skills and expertise.  They were both incredibly supportive of using technical material in the exhibition and also very good at making sure it was clearly presented. We were all very keen that the technical research didn’t seem to be bolted on but was integrated into the narrative of the exhibition.  I hope that we have succeeded. 

As conservators we tend to stay behind the scenes and generally our work is successful if it isn’t noticed. However from the beginning of the Reynolds Research Project I was asked to go into the galleries at the Wallace Collection and speak about my work. Now that the exhibition is open I’ve relished the opportunity to talk about the paintings that I’ve come to know so well and expand upon the information included on the labels. I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to curate an exhibition but I would definitely welcome the opportunity to do it again.

Alexandra Gent is Paintings Conservator for the Reynolds Research Project at the Wallace Collection and co-curator of the exhibition Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint. She is also currently working as a paintings conservator for Tate.  @AlexandraRGent

#miniobjects and the First World War

If there's one thing we love at the Ministry, it's hearing from 'behind the scenes' staff of museums. Conservators are particularly fascinating as they get to work hands-on with all the best stuff in the stores. We asked Louise Stewart Beck from the Science Museum to give us an insight into her favourite #miniobject...

Mini things are universally appealing. Proof: when I brought this object out of the stores, every one of the conservators in the lab crowded around to have a look. “It’s so tiny!” (About 8 inches long) “That’s not for babies, is it?” (It’s not.) “Then what’s it for?” Well, miniature versions of objects had a lot of purposes besides being entertaining. Small-scale objects are used to demonstrate proof-of-concept for new products and buildings, to gain an understanding of materials, or to carry around as sales models, since they’re more portable than the actual object. This model prosthetic was made by Alex Munro Armstrong of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, who lost his own leg in 1918 and probably based this model on his own leg. For the Science Museum, this model serves as an important research tool, demonstrating a type of prosthetic made at a certain point in time.

Louise Stewart Beck is currently a conservation intern at the Science Museum working on the First World War medical collections. She completed her master’s degree in Conservation at UCL last year. Follow her on twitter @LouiseSBeck