A note from Edith P. Mayo
Curator Emeritus, Smithsonian Institution

The National Women's History Museum (NWHM) is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich and diverse heritage of women. Our goal is to bring visibility and legitimacy to women's past and to restore it to mainstream culture.

Women constitute 52 percent of our nation's population, yet they are sadly missing from the visible record of the historical past as it is celebrated in our national public spaces. Few statues, national parks, or historic sites commemorate women's lives or memorialize their contributions to the American past. And this phenomenon is not unique to America. In recent years women historians throughout the world, have made valiant efforts to rectify this exclusion. Still, few museum exhibits are devoted to women, and, even in the United States, less than 5 percent of the nation's 2,200 historic landmarks chronicle their achievements. When women are included, their record is often marginalized or trivialized, presented as a historical digression from history's main text, exceptions to the real historical record. One half of our population has been written out of the past.

Women have experienced this historical marginalization as a continuing pattern, yet our society still wonders why institutionalized forms of sex discrimination continue – from the economic disparity between men and women evident in the glass ceiling and feminization of poverty, to the soaring rates of teenage pregnancies, the well-documented gender bias in American classrooms, and the plunging self-esteem of young women as they enter their adolescence.

Knowledge of one's heritage, and pride in past accomplishments, are critical to developing a personal and collective sense of competence and potential. Chronic invisibility in the past cripples women's lives in the present, depriving them of the strength of a cumulative, positive force on which to build, and creating a false impression of lack of accomplishments.

The National Women's History Museum will document not only inclusionary history where women are included as contributors to fields formerly thought all male, but will also bring a new historical angle of vision based on the emerging scholarship of women. Simply adding women to traditionally male categories of achievement serves to reinforce the cultural assumption that they are the only arenas where success is worthwhile. Filtered through the prism of gender, history looks quite different, revealing new kinds of questions to be asked about the past, challenging old assumptions, and forcing a reinterpretation of historical issues once thought resolved.

History has been considered primarily in male-defined terms, and questions asked about the past were often inappropriate to women's experiences. Not until women, as well as men, define the theories and frame the questions about the past, not until historical periods reflect the patterns of women's lives, will meaningful women's history appear in museums. We intend to make this our primary goal.

The construction of historical memory is crucial because the interpretation of the past shapes the politics and economics of the present. Women must begin to see themselves as actors in the past, to gain strength and inspiration for their own struggles in the present. History can be a powerful tool. Visibility in the past equals empowerment in the present.

Best of all, gaining knowledge and insight into women's past can bring us closer toward weaving the experience of men and women together into a shared fabric of life, one that will bring us toward a common and equitable future.

Sincerely,

Edith P. Mayo

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