Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women’s History into Focus
Why does it seem like women’s history has been written in disappearing ink?
Women’s history is, by its very nature, an exercise in resilience. The records that allow us to tell women’s stories—whether pieces of material culture like a midwife’s satchel, archival sources such as diaries, or recordings of oral histories—have to survive. The people who save them need to trust their instincts that they are worthy of attention despite others’ apathy, resistance, or even ridicule. Archivists, curators, and historians must assert that women’s lives are important and find ways to share their findings. And audiences hungry for more women’s stories must insist that teachers, textbooks, libraries, and museums enrich our view of the past by fully integrating women’s participation.
For generations, women’s historians have fought against the tendency in American culture to ignore or forget women’s significant impact on our country’s past and present. Visit the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s first digital exhibition, Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women’s History into Focus, to learn how curators across the Smithsonian have helped save and interpret objects that allow us to shine a new light on women’s stories which otherwise might have disappeared.
Patent Model for Paper Bag Machine by Margaret E. Knight
Source: National Museum of American HistoryThe exhibition begins with an introduction narrated by Rosario Dawson and centers on five women whose accomplishments have been excluded from history books, whose contributions have gone uncredited, and whose stories have been nearly lost to time. Each woman’s story comes to life through objects from the Smithsonian’s collections, archival records, recorded interviews with Smithsonian curators, and original illustrations and animations.
The work of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum is an act of resilience, fighting the propensity to let women’s achievements go unacknowledged.
Visit the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s first digital exhibition, Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women’s History into Focus, to learn how curators across the Smithsonian have helped save and interpret objects that allow us to shine a new light on women’s stories which otherwise might have disappeared.
