Family business: Museum visitation as gender performance

Family groups are the central social unit of American social life through which parents transmit values, traditions, and beliefs to their children. Museum visits are an extremely popular leisure choice for families. Using qualitative and quantitative methodology from anthropology, museum visitor studies and audience research, a study of behavior, experiences, and beliefs regarding leisure and museums of family museum visitors was conducted at thirteen museums in Wisconsin and Illinois. Nonvisitor families at parks, beaches and ethnic festivals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were also studied. Three questions informed the inquiry: Is one gender more influential than another in choosing to bring a family to a museum, and if so, why? What is the functional role of the museum in American culture? How do men and women differently understand and use museums? Data were gathered from museum visitors and non-visitors through: (1) participant and nonparticipant observation; (2) open-ended paper-pencil surveys; (3) unstructured, informal interviews; and (4) focus groups. Analysis of findings suggests that most family visitors believe museums preserve the past and embody culture, and value museums as educational institutions. Parent-visitors subscribe to gendered ethnotheories emphasizing valued experiences informed by cultural parenting models and socialization experiences. Women visitors, as goal-oriented family resource managers with well-defined selection criteria, purposefully choose museum visits as a productive investment of time, money and energy that return worthwhile benefits in terms of knowledge, values acquisition, and family bonding. Men visitors, with less responsibility for family work and more diffuse criteria for leisure selection, often visit museums only at the urging of women, and view family museum visits as only one of many choices that equally satisfy their leisure needs and fulfill their fatherly role of providing satisfying economical family entertainment. Museum visits are thus gender performances. Data from non-visitors suggest that socio-economic status interacts with gender in leisure choice. Nonvisitor women, usually nonwhite, low-income and less-educated than visitors, choose other leisure destinations in which to spend their more limited time, money and energy, strengthen family bonds, and transmit shared cultural values. Nonvisitors generally view museums as expensive, unwelcoming places promoting less valued perspectives and knowledge.