Women’s Representation in Holocaust Museums
March 28, 2025
A Research Brief by Dr. Katie Chaka Parks, Director of Education at The HC. Published in the International Association of Genocide Scholars in January 2025.
“An entire subset of Holocaust history is devoted to every aspect of women’s experiences, and it is time that public and academic institutions work in tandem.”
Museums act as conduits of historical information to the public. As such, these institutions are responsible for considering their role in creating and perpetuating historical narratives. Using gender as a category of historical analysis reveals how women are underrepresented within memorial spaces dedicated to the Holocaust.
This study explores how representations of women’s experiences are displayed within major Holocaust museums throughout the United States and how these representations inform our understanding of the memory and history of the Holocaust. Following best practices for including women’s experiences will allow future generations to understand a fuller history of this catastrophic event and its implications for the world today.
Representing Women’s Experiences in Holocaust Museums
This study examines seven of the most prominent Holocaust museums from diverse locations across the United States. I am primarily interested in how visitors experience a museum through a museum’s exhibits and guided or self-guided tours. Spending hours at each field site as a walk-in visitor, I read the museum exhibits as historical documents through their panels, artifacts, photographs, and videos, which is essential to understanding the main narrative transmitted by these museums.
Analyzing these exhibits reveals what each organization believes to be the essential information to teach visitors about the Holocaust, balanced against the practicalities of issues like time, finances, staffing, and expertise. I found that the largest and most influential Holocaust museums within the United States do not adequately include women’s history and experiences, making their exhibits inaccurate and misleading.
Authoritative representations of the Holocaust within these museums tell an overwhelmingly male story, representing it as typical rather than gendered.
The omission of women’s experience is not due to a lack of research on the topic. Women and gender as analytical concepts in the history of Nazi Germany emerged in the 1980s, slowly shifting to include the contributions of women within historical narratives.
These debates typically centered on whether women were victims, collaborators, or active resisters of power structures and the varying level of state influence over the private sphere of the home and family, which can be found in the notable works of historians including Claudia Koonz, Wendy Lower, Gisela Bock, and Lisa Pine.
Others focused on Jewish women’s lives during the Holocaust and how their experiences were largely ignored within the historical field. The “absorption” of women’s experiences into descriptions of male ones led Joan Ringelheim and Sybil Milton to argue that regardless of research, scholars were ignoring gendered differences during the Holocaust. Both Milton and Ringelheim highlight sexual violence and women’s sexual vulnerability, their experiences in the camps and ghettos, as well as their resistance efforts and survival techniques, and sexual violence.
Much like the discussions surrounding the place of German women under National Socialism, these historians also highlighted the connections between sexism and biology that existed for Jewish women, which included analyzing antisemitic legislation that primarily targeted the reproductive rights of Jewish women.
Zöe Waxman’s work shows that women’s lives were different during the Holocaust precisely because they were women, and that ignoring these differences reflects gendered hierarchies in the present. Many of these debates about female agency and women’s experiences do not overlap with the broader scholarship about the Holocaust, resulting in an incomplete history of the Holocaust.
The Exclusion of Women’s “Inappropriate” Stories
Despite decades of research on women’s experiences during the Holocaust, it is very clear that women’s specific histories are muted within these museums. Individual women may be visibly represented on the walls in photos and survivor testimonies; however, the exhibits often miss the overarching narrative of women’s collective experiences. While each museum displays women’s experiences to varying degrees of inclusion and exclusion, as a whole, Holocaust museums are insufficiently portraying specific experiences of women.
Beyond the lack of adequate space and representation of women’s histories, these museums also omit information to varying degrees, especially topics concerning:
Menstruation, sexual violence including rape and the fear of rape, concentration camp brothels, pregnancy, women’s experiences during Kristallnacht and emigration efforts, consensual acts of sex, Ravensbrück concentration camp (an exclusively female camp), birth control, elected and forced abortions, medical experiments on women including mass sterilization, sexual favors and forced sexual coercion, breastfeeding, lesbianism, women in hiding, and sexual coercion and sexual violence during liberation
To be clear, it is not that every museum ignores all of these topics; it is more that these historical topics are not prioritized in Holocaust museums. So why are there topics that appear to be “off limits” in Holocaust museums regarding women?
The problem is often masquerading behind social norms concerning what is and is not publicly appropriate. “Appropriateness” becomes an excuse to exclude women’s stories. All the topics surrounding women’s experiences that are missing in Holocaust museum exhibits deal with sexuality. Although issues surrounding women’s sexuality during the Holocaust are difficult to talk about, they are essential to understanding Nazi genocide against the Jews and to acknowledging the horrors that women endured.
Further, Holocaust museums are not supposed to be places of comfort but of evidence and truth. The lack of representation of women’s stories in mainstream history, including in museums, perpetuates the social shame that female survivors often feel about their experiences during the Holocaust and must be addressed.
Recommendations for Making Museums More Balanced
Efforts to institutionalize women’s stories should be made to improve the historical accuracy of museums, which in turn support museum goals of memorialization and remembrance.
1 – Equitable Real Estate
Museums need to signal to visitors that women’s information is essential to understanding the Holocaust without simply adding a separate panel on women. The physical space and size of galleries coupled with equitable panel text are both needed to more fully integrate women’s experiences during the Holocaust into the exhibits.
2 – Training and Education at Every Level
Continuing education is necessary for both staff and volunteer docents to learn about women’s unique experiences and how they can include this information in all of the various work that they do.
3 – Leadership from the Top Down
It is critical for institutional leadership to mandate that women’s history be included in all aspects of the museum and to create institutional goals and objectives to guide inclusion of this information in museum education, collections, events and programming, and social media and marketing.
4 – Time and Commitment
For most museums, incorporating women’s experiences during the Holocaust into their museum work will be new. While this approach may be new, it should not be treated as an “experiment,” but requires enduring commitment institution-wide.
Women endured unimaginable horrors during the Holocaust because of their gender, and it is only right that we remember their experiences, their sacrifices, and their bravery.
Recommended Readings and Resources:
- Parks, Katie Chaka. “But the Women are on the Walls!”: A Gendered Analysis of Holocaust Museums in the United States. Order No. 31331494,
Wayne State University, 2024, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/women-are-on-walls-gendered-analysisholocaust/docview/3111065159/se-2. - Rittner, Carol and John Roth. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. St. Paul: Paragon House, 1993.
- Kaplan, Marion. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Ofer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman. Women in the Holocaust. Yale University Press, 1999.
- Ringelheim, Joan. “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10, no. 4 (1985): 741-761.
- Waxman, Zöe. Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
