Legacy
The story of King Manor’s founding has large parallels on a societal level. The women who started the King Manor Association were able to do so because they had money. Even while historic preservation professionalized, it remained (and still does) an underpaid field because it was historically practiced by women who did it as a “passion” and didn’t “need the money” because they had husbands to support them.
What other “pink-collar” jobs typically underpaid and performed by women can you think of?
Look at the contemporary roles reflected in this doll house:
Why are men always the ones “manning” the grill or doing yardwork?
As gender roles, and the definition of gender, in American society continues to change, where will the different dolls be in the dollhouse of the future?
While the women of the King Manor Association literally worked inside a home, their dedication and that of other early women historic preservationists helped bring women’s activism to the social forefront, winning the right to vote, at least for some women, in 1920.
One hundred years later, women’s history is at the forefront of the national conversation: the #MeToo Movement and other contemporary women’s rights movements are shedding light on the ways women have been treated and governed by society, sometimes as victims of unconscious bias, but often as targets of discrimination. Much more so for minority women.
Although women are no longer officially relegated to the domestic “sphere” in America, the legacy of the cult of domesticity remains.