Museums of natural history play a significant role in interpreting the natural world in scientific terms. They are sites where initially taxonomic, then geographic, and more recently environmental emphases have been reflected in their holdings and displays. Several issues frame their history: what individual museums hold; how objects are acquired; which material artifacts are displayed and in what arrangement; what audience observes them and for what purposes; and who sponsors museum activities. Cultural historians are particularly interested in museums as places that elaborate meaning through material objects on display, paying particular attention when interpretation is contested. Museum historians have traced the work of curators who developed and extended systematics within the natural sciences.

Darwinian evolutionary theory intensified debate about the origin and dimensions of sexual difference in species, not only in scientific and medical literature but also within wider intellectual circles whose members quickly entered a multidimensioned public debate about “the woman question.” Charles Darwin himself contributed directly to the discussion by his introduction of the mechanism of sexual selection in Origin of Species (1859) and through his widely read Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), where he most fully elaborated his ideas about women's nature. Other scientists, social scientists, and popularizers – mostly men – appropriated the evolutionary model into their discussions about women's nature in the last half of the nineteenth century and presumed that their personal observations represented biological determinations. The prescriptive sexual categories provided by scientists and physicians working within the evolutionary framework became dominant in a culture increasingly preoccupied with scientific explanations. Educated women in the nineteenth century were on the periphery of conversations about Darwinian theories for lack of institutional and professional forums, but they were hardly disinterested in evolutionary arguments, particularly as such concepts related to individual women and to women's collective circumstances. A few women, however, took up Darwinism directly, drawing on their own experience to extend or challenge theories and sometimes to position their advocacy of women's rights. They took up these arguments because the emphasis on evolutionary change and the mechanisms of sexual selection provided an opportunity to rethink “the woman question” in their own terms.

In the nineteenth century, sometimes dubbed the “century of science,” formal learned institutions in Europe and throughout its imperial systems consolidated activity in the natural sciences. Research previously done by individuals and through informal correspondence now became concentrated in major urban museums administered by voluntary societies and state governments. Although museums were by no means new - the Greek muses resided in such facilities - they took on distinctive and expanded dimensions in the period of exploration and colonial expansion. Natural history museums became the principal agencies for research in the natural sciences. Created to serve primarily local and national constituencies, these major museums were nonetheless deeply engaged in international communication and exchange. Their collective agenda in the nineteenth century was to catalog all specimens in the natural world, and increasingly, their intention was to find the historical and dynamic (environmental or ecological) relationship among them.

During the “golden age of museum building in the nineteenth century, these facilities were viewed in a number of ways - as temples to science, facilities for preservation and research, cultural centers demonstrating urbane sophistication, and, increasingly over the century, as instruments for education. The definitions of museum education were provided in generaland often rhetorical terms, following a presumption that visitors were responsible for their own learning. Early in the nineteenth century, museum proprietors claimed only that their displays could stimulate “rational amusement.” Exhibits of abnormal specimens or shelves arrayed with minerals, stuffed birds, pinned insects, and shells, institutions at midcentury paid relatively less attention to broad public needs than to preservation and publication.