Should We Build a National Women’s Museum?
A centralized museum in Washington is liable to be excessively ideological and historically garbled.
On February 10, the House Committee on Natural Resources held a legislative hearing on the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The Women’s Museum itself was authorized in 2020, but Congress still needs to authorize land to build it. Before Congress acts, lawmakers and the public should weigh in on whether such a museum is wise in principle and consider what it is likely to become in practice.
The Women’s Museum currently exists as a website, with blogs, learning resources, and featured exhibits. Those exhibits appear in other Smithsonian museums. “Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism” is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “The First Ladies” is in the National Museum of American History.
What we know about the Women’s Museum so far does not inspire confidence, and waiting for it to be built to have these discussions would be counterproductive. Specifically, the current bill to allocate land does not define “woman,” which raises the likelihood that the museum would include achievements of biological men.
This concern is not speculative. A 2021 blog titled “LGBTQ+ Women Who Made History,” includes the tennis player Renée Richards, who underwent sex reassignment surgery and competed in the U.S. Open. Richards is lauded as “one of the first professional athletes to identify as transgender.”
Recent developments at the Smithsonian and in the museum world more broadly do not bode well. There have been a number of issues with ideological bias at the Smithsonian museums. Most infamously, the Museum of African American History portrayed traits such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” and hard work as features of “white culture.” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch coauthored a report by the American Alliance of Museums that begins, “DEAI is integral to excellence in museum practice. FULL STOP.” The American Alliance of Museums is a notable organization, including 35,000 museums and museum professionals.
These trends are downstream of higher education. Curators have degrees in museum studies from majority-liberal institutions. Experts tapped for the Women’s Museum are likely to have credentials in gender studies taught through a Marxist lens.
Bipartisan oversight committees often prove ineffective. Cultural issues receive less sustained attention from conservatives, and some shy away from difficult political battles.
Conservatives also lack a deep, serious bench of scholars on women’s history. We face our own problems with radicals. There are some scholars who take women’s perspectives seriously. But many assume the Sexual Revolutionaries’ premise that there is a logical and straight line from first-wave feminism to today’s ideologies.
As historian Christopher Lasch—whom legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon called “the Man Who Loved Women and Democracy”—wrote, “In the light of the subsequent radicalization of the women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique is usually read (when it is read at all) as the first halting step down the road since traveled by an army of more militant women.”
Lasch argued that the deeper issue was how to revive a sense of vocation in a society that had lost a shared sense of purpose.
Beyond these practical concerns lie deeper questions about the museum itself. Should we have a “women’s” museum? Is women’s history best told by the federal government?
Efforts to depict lesser-known stories are laudable, and those stories are often fascinating. Many women’s lives, more than men’s, were historically lived in private.
The history of American women is rich and varied, with remarkable individuals and community efforts, private sacrifices and public accomplishments, injustices and triumphs. The same is true of the American story.
Mercy Otis Warren wrote plays and poems supporting the patriot cause, authored the only Antifederalist history of the American Revolution, and published an influential pamphlet for a Bill of Rights. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, second only to the Bible in 19th-century sales, forced a nation to confront its conscience about slavery.
American women have played a substantial role in civil society and philanthropy and have at times rallied against injustices. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which saved and still oversees George Washington’s home, demonstrates the spirited character of American women.
In the early 19th century, first-wave feminists—often allied with abolitionists and temperance advocates—highlighted the damage caused by alcohol consumption. In 1830, Americans drank three times as much as they do today, and some husbands were tippling away the family income.
But is this “women’s history,” or simply American history? Can the two be cleanly separated? Perhaps we can agree that the Suffrage Movement was women’s history, though men were part of it.
But what about Roe v. Wade or Cosmopolitan magazines? Will women’s history be reduced to the story of the Sexual Revolution, with abortion and transhumanism treated as its central goals?
Given the current environment, this outcome seems likely. Reasonable and legitimate attempts to consider demographics or how sex differences matter often devolve into oppressor–oppressed framings. These divisions overlook the shared work of men and women and obscure mutual sacrifice. Do such categories fairly describe an infantry nurse who endured the Depression and raised numerous children? Or her husband, who served in the Second World War and labored in dangerous factory work? Much of the shared, the noble, and the tragic of the human experience is lost with such reductive grids. But it seems likely that the Women’s Museum will be about how women have been wronged in or by America rather than the ways women have contributed to America.
While laws like coverture and the denial of voting rights were serious injustices, the American story is a triumphant one of recognizing the equal dignity of the human person. Declaring “all men are created equal” provided the moral logic for the elimination of slavery and women’s enfranchisement. That trajectory, and the gratitude and patriotism it inspires, is often lost in the rigidity and resentment of postmodernism.
There are also other considerations about the construction of the Women’s Museum. History matters, but that doesn’t mean the federal government is the best institution to preserve it. National museums based in DC piece together history that occurred elsewhere. Rather than expanding the number of federal museums centralized in DC, what about encouraging Americans to go to institutions like Molly Brown’s House in Colorado, the places where history really happened? Is there something lost when the efforts to band together and raise the funds to preserve the home of a local hero are taken from communities and subsumed by the national government?
It is quite American for civic associations to take responsibility for preserving the American story and American treasures. Americans used to do such things more, and we have ceded many of these habits of self-government. Beyond that intangible cost, centralization creates the incentive to remove artifacts from local communities and relocate them to Washington. While there is value in having a Museum of American History, such museums are particularly vulnerable to ideological issues. They lack natural limits, so their framing is more reliant on curators. (This is different from places like battlefields, which are historically significant for particular and inherent reasons. It would be quite odd, for example, to have an exhibit on Mark Twain at Mount Vernon.) The Museum of American History is currently a bit of a hodge-podge, its mission unclear. The Women’s Museum would face the same issues.
Further, most Americans, particularly children, only have so much time and attention. Families often have to make a choice about which Smithsonian museums to visit when they come to DC, and hurry through the expansive collections.
Would building a separate women’s history museum actually result in more citizens learning about the women of America? Or would exhibits on women’s history at the Museum of American History garner more attention? For comparison, the Museum of American History receives 2.1 million visitors per year, while the Museum of African American History and Culture receives 1.6 million. Since the Women’s Museum currently features exhibits at the Museum of American History, further integration seems feasible.
America was built by remarkable men and women, and by citizens who have established lives of quiet and shared dignity. But the Women’s Museum is unlikely to paint that landscape with accuracy, nuance, and loveliness. Moreover, the stewardship of history may be better left to localities and states, our efforts more effectively focused on reviving and establishing the civic associations that have governed our heritage. Congress should consider the questions about the project before it’s too late.
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