3 ideas
In Chapter 18, Mullins compares Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes with Caravaggio's version of the same scene. Where Caravaggio's Judith holds back from the act, Gentileschi's women hold the man down and behead him with physical force and resolve.
Mullins describes the barriers that kept women and non-European makers from the training and recognition that produced a recorded career, such as exclusion from academies and from drawing the nude model. She widens the history partly to restore makers these barriers held back. She also includes artists who had successful careers and were only left out of later histories.
Treat every museum object as something that once had a working job in its own society, such as ritual, royal record, memorial or propaganda. Then trace the route by which it reached the gallery. The Benin brass plaques, cast to record court history in the Oba's palace, reached European museums through the British punitive expedition of 1897. The acquisition story is part of what the object now means.