Women's History Museum Hits Hurdles

At a time when more women are serving in Congress than ever before in history - 79 in the House and 20 in the Senate - passing a bill on a women’s history museum might seem, if not easy, then at least non-controversial. But the sponsor of that bill’s House version, Upper East Side Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, has hit a few roadblocks in her mission to establish the first and only museum in America that would deal solely and comprehensively with women’s history.
The bill before Congress now, which passed the House with a major bipartisan push and fierce advocacy from Maloney, would establish a Congressional commission to prepare a report on recommendations for creating and maintaining a national women’s history museum on federal land in Washington, D.C. The eight-member commission, appointed by members of both parties, would have 18 months to study the issue and deliver a report to Congress. Despite resounding public support and that of prominent Republicans including Speaker Boehner and former Majority Leader Eric Cantor, however, the bill is facing a major obstacle in the Senate.
A pair of Republican budget hawks, Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Lee of Utah, are holding up the bill. Both say they won’t support the museum based on the fact that it could cost taxpayers, a point which especially exasperates Maloney, since she included language stating that the commission would use no federal funds.
“They keep insisting that it’s going to cost money, It’s not,” Maloney said. “I find it’s a puzzle that they are opposed to it. Do they just want to keep women down and back? I don’t know.”
The bill names a nonprofit organization, called the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM), which would raise money to support the commission and also hopes to be appointed as a main fundraiser of the future museum. But that has brought the other obstacle to the forefront.
Groups of prominent women’s historians have recently voiced objections to the bill as it stands in the Senate. They are concerned that the language for forming the commission doesn’t explicitly require any professional historian be appointed, and that the NWHM is named in the bill as the fundraising organization.
The National Coalition for History wrote a letter to Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican sponsor of the Senate companion bill, asking that it be amended to mandate the inclusion of professional historians to the commission, as well as strike any mention of the NWHM organization.
“The major crux is asking that there not be a presumption that the NWHM should be the sole fundraiser,” said executive director Lee White. “They should just leave it out. You’re putting together this blue ribbon commission; let them decide who should raise the money.”
Maloney says that there is no way the bill would pass if it asked for federal funds, or if it didn’t include a plan to raise private money. She also emphasizes that the current bill is simply about creating a commission, not a fundraising plan for the future museum.
“[The bill] looks at the creation of a national women’s history museum; it has no money. It will come back to the House and Senate to be voted on after the commission does their work and reports back,” she said.
Dr. Sonya Michel, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park and a prominent scholar on women’s history, served on the Scholars Advisory Council to the NWHM, until that group was dissolved by the organization earlier this year, a move that Michel says came right before many of its members planned to resign over objections to how they have approached women’s history.
Michel and many of her colleagues want to make sure that professional historians are involved from the outset of forming the museum, even at the commission level, because they say that women’s history is a complex and involved discipline that requires expertise to translate into a museum setting.
“It’s theoretically possible that the entire commission could be made of people who have done public service [and are not historians],” Michel said. “We are just are very concerned about that, this is our big shot at getting a women’s history museum and we want to make sure it does justice to women’s history.”
Michel and fellow historian Dr. Alice Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History at Columbia University, wrote an op-ed published last week by the History News Network laying out their objections to the way the NWHM has approached its subject matter.
“The museum’s website and publications tended to focus on the ‘contributions’ of individual women, mostly white and middle-class, offering a parade of famous ‘firsts.’” Michel and Kessler-Harris wrote. “This superficial approach bore little resemblance to the way professionals understand women’s history—as a complex web woven by movements as well as individuals, divided as well as united across racial, class, religious and regional lines, and facing many obstacles as well as celebrating triumphs.”
Michel said that the NWHM is primarily a lobbying organization, and shouldn’t be at the helm of deciding how to present women’s history in a national museum. She has repeatedly pointed out that without the involvement of professional historians, the group’s ongoing education and outreach efforts will suffer.
For example, “they had put up this website, it was about suffrage and it was just awful,” Michel said. “It was inaccurate, superficial and embarrassing. [The scholars advisory council realized] the museum is using us. Our names are attached to depictions of women’s history we could not support.”
In a response to that op-ed, president and CEO of NWHM Joan Wages wrote that the insistence on changing the bill’s language is unnecessary, since it calls for the appointment of commissioners with “demonstrated commitment to the research, study, or promotion of women’s history, art, political or economic status, or culture,” as well as expertise in museum administration and other qualifications related to the study of women’s history.
Maloney says that all these objections are premature, and that it makes no sense to get historians involved when the museum would still be in its nascent planning stages.
“On the commission you’re not the curator, you’re not creating the content of what’s going to be displayed,” Maloney said. “Obviously if the museum is commissioned they will hire curators who are historians.”
She pointed to Emily Rafferty, the outgoing president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as an example of a theoretical commission appointee who doesn’t have a PhD in women’s history but who is a woman with extensive experience in running a world-class museum and could serve the commission well. (Maloney pointed out that she personally will have no power to appoint anyone to the commission if the bill passes.)
Maloney isn’t sure what she’ll do if the bill doesn’t make it to the floor for a vote in the Senate this session; she sees this as a now-or-never scenario and acknowledges that her bill may not pass the House a second time, which is a big reason she doesn’t want the Senate version amended.
“You have to get floor time, that’s hard to get,” Maloney said. “A lot of people don’t care about women’s issues. They just want to forget about it, as we’ve been forgotten throughout history.”
Michel said that she and the scholars objecting to the bill aren’t against building a museum; they welcome it and appreciate all the work Maloney and her colleagues have done. But they also hold firm in their insistence that the process should involve historians from the outset.
“We’re not saying we have a monopoly on women’s history, but we do know a lot about it,” Michel said. She pointed to the NWHM website as an example of why historians should be consulted, even at this early stage.
“Every day they have a little bulletin about some woman’s birthday or some woman did this event, instead of saying, why were there no women before that, and who were the women who came after that, what were the conditions, the economy, the culture,” she said. “Women’s history is more complicated than that.”