In late 2015, I got a call from Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This doesn’t happen often, but over the years that I worked in media in DC and NY, and Speaker Pelosi served in Congress, we got to know each other. I am a great admirer of her leadership, her resilience, and her many accomplishments.
She was calling to give me an assignment: to join a congressional commission to study the feasibility of creating a national women’s history museum in Washington and to prepare and present a report to Congress.
Of course, I said yes, and with her usual directness, the Speaker reminded me that working on a bipartisan commission might challenge my strongly held individual beliefs or opinions, but she was counting on me and the other women being appointed by Republican and Democratic leaders to get this done.
Nancy Pelosi donating her gavel to the Smithsonian. Beside her are other objects from the institute’s collections representing women’s firsts. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.
I had strong opinions, to be sure, about the need for women’s stories and accomplishments to be better known. In fact, as a documentary filmmaker in 1994, I convinced Ted Turner to fund a series on the history of American women (A CENTURY OF WOMEN). He was sold on the idea when I told him the stories we would tell in the film were not in the history books — most weren’t, and many still aren’t.
In our nation’s capital, there are many museums celebrating nearly every aspect of American history — from space to stamps to spies — but among all the national Smithsonian museums, there is not one dedicated to recognizing the contributions of American women in every aspect of this country’s history.
There was, and is, a virtual nonprofit women’s museum (NWHM.org) with special exhibits celebrating women’s history and a curriculum for studying women’s history in classrooms. This important independent nonprofit has been valiantly raising funds to build a physical museum for many years … and in fact, the board of NWHM.org contributed to the funding of our commission as it was their goal, too, to get congressional authorization for a national women’s history museum in Washington, D.C.
The bill calling for such authorization had been stuck in committee, and in spite of bipartisan support in the House and the very determined advocacy of Representative Carolyn Maloney, had not advanced. Our new commission had the task of doing the due diligence and constructing a proposal that would convince Congress to pass an authorization.
A daunting but irresistible challenge for the eight of us who met for the first time in a conference room at a Washington, D.C. hotel. We found ourselves rather naturally gravitating to one side or the other of the big conference table — four Democratic women leaders on one side; four Republican women leaders on the other. Our first united act was to elect Jane Abraham, former vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party, as chair of the commission. What a great choice it turned out to be! Jane has a leader’s special ability to stay calm but in control, to create a space for fair and open discussion at a table where the opinions were well-honed and well-defended by women accustomed to being asked for their input and ideas.
We made another early and smart decision to hire an experienced executive director, Wendy Pangburn, whose work as a consultant on congressional initiatives and whose “we can do this” attitude and awesome energy kept us on track, on budget, on time, and always moving forward, even when there were moments when our differences on certain issues threatened to disrupt the process. Once or twice, as we retreated into our partisan (and passionate) sides of the table, Jane would equitably and firmly remind us of our mission and that as women with a mission, we were not going to fail!
My previous experiences as a journalist, documenting the successful role women played in negotiating peaceful settlements in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador, had convinced me that when women optimize our natural inclinations to collaborate, to seek consensus, we can put aside individual differences when needed to negotiate peace or in this case, to shape a museum proposal. Yes, I began to see this dynamic emerging at our table. And as I had also experienced in my previous work with women, the commissioners became friends. During long bus rides to review potential locations and the occasional “after deliberations” drinks and dinners, we began to see each other more fully than as representatives of the partisan sides of a bipartisan commission.
From the beginning, we recognized (and regretted) the lack of diversity in our group, and made it a priority to bring as wide a range of voices, backgrounds, communities and cultures into the process. Over the 18 months of work, we interviewed and met with a diverse group of prominent women’s history scholars and held some “listening tours” and convened forums in various cities to capture as wide as range of opinions about what both women and men wanted from a national women’s museum. We also had the important support and counsel of other museum consultants, proposal writers, publicists and lobbyists … too many to name but each contributed immensely to our final report presentation to Congress.
Top: Members of the Commission pose with Representative Maloney (NY) and Senator Susan Collins (ME). Below: Members of the Commission pose with Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA) and Representative Maloney (NY).
We went together to Capitol Hill on a beautiful November day in 2016 and the report was officially accepted by a small bipartisan group of members of Congress. On the same day, a copy of the report was also presented to President Barack Obama. Then … Silence! Donald Trump was inaugurated shortly afterward, and we could only assume that our report, along with a similar feasibility study and proposal to build an American Latino Museum, was gathering dust on a shelf in some congressional committee’s office.
But we didn’t stop our advocacy and continued to meet and strategize with the Smithsonian about how to re-ignite interests in a new museum at a time when most cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, were struggling for needed funds. Cleverly, we agreed to create a Smithsonian Women’s History Initiative within the Smithsonian as a pan-institutional effort to increase the recognition of women’s contributions in our nation’s history logs. Our commissioners, independently, raised the first $3 million to get the Smithsonian’s Initiative off the ground. These lead gifts from Mary Boies, the DeVos Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation represented true political diversity.
From 2017-2020, the Smithsonian Women’s History Initiative has sponsored remarkable programs and exhibits under their signature theme Because of Her Story. All the while, Representative Maloney and her counterparts in the Senate, Senators Susan Collins and Dianne Feinstein continued to work hard on legislation to create a women’s history standalone museum as part of the Smithsonian.
Finally, in February 2020, the House passed their bill. Now attention focused on the Senate. In November 2020, our chair, Jane, alongside Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, testified before the Senate Rules Committee and it looked good for finally getting the bill out of committee to the floor of the Senate for a vote. But to our entire commission’s great disappointment, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee cast the deciding and dissenting vote blocking it from a floor vote, saying, "The last thing we need, is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups."
As a non-hyphenated identity group, more than 50% of the population of this country, and with powerful sponsors, Susan Collins and Dianne Feinstein, we strategized another way forward. Our last chance was getting the museum authorization language into the omnibus spending bill. The women senators succeeded and the bill passed the Senate this month and finally, just a few days ago, got signed into law by the president.
The commission had succeeded in our mission! We finally had our authorization … something that took much, much longer for other new national museums to receive, and the work is hardly finished.
We have to raise the money to build this museum as the legislation calls for a 50/50 split between government funds and private sector funds – the same formula that the Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture was built upon. I’m confident we will raise the necessary funds and by working closely with the Smithsonian team, we will take the next steps on launching a campaign in the near future to add an American Women’s History Museum (AWHM) to our Smithsonian’s family of national museums in our capital city, to document and celebrate the significant but still largely untold and unacknowledged history of American women’s accomplishments and contributions to this country.
I am profoundly grateful to each of my sister commissioners for the experience of working together and reaching this milestone in our journey to create the American Women’s History Museum. Our experience together strengthens my belief that when women show up for one another, when women commit to collective problem solving — whether it’s at a table to negotiate sustainable peace agreements or at a table to shape a museum proposal — we are a dangerously effective force, one that can and does bridge differences to reach shared goals.
I will remind myself of this lesson each time I cross the portal of the future AWHM in Washington, D.C., believing that the more we know from our past, the better we inform and inspire our future. And that women — open to listen and learn, talk and trust — will lead the future to be even better than our past.
Happy New Year!
- Pat
