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Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, 1910 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Francis A. DiMauro) -
Helen Adams Keller, 27 Jun 1880 – 1 Jun 1968 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) -
Lollaretta Pemberton Allen, American, 1895 – 1979 (left) (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Rita C. Organ and Pemberton Family) and Unidentified Woman (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Jennifer Cain Bohrnstedt) -
Gertrude Caroline Ederle, 23 Oct 1906 – 30 Nov 2003 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) -
Amelia Mary Earhart and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of George R. Rinhart, in memory of Joan Rinhart) -
Unidentified Woman or Women (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
About the Event
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes many villages to launch a national history museum.
One such museum gaining momentum is the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, legislated into existence by Congress in December 2020. The mission of this new museum is to “expand the story of America through the often-untold accounts and accomplishments of women—individually and collectively—to better understand our past and inspire our future.” By doing so, the museum hopes to create “a more representative history [and] a more collective future.”
When it opens its doors, this new museum will have its home on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and be part of the Smithsonian Institution establishment, the largest museum, research and education complex in the world.
First, though, the American History Women’s Museum must become physically real. And launching a new museum, by the Smithsonian’s own estimation, can take ten years or more. Multiple phases are involved, from fundraising to building a space to assembling a collection to hiring staff, telling the museum’s story, and more.
A group of Chicago area women who have been strategizing about the museum’s creation and future found a place to collaborate in the fall of 2025 when they convened in the Chicago offices of the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay. Their strategy session brought together women executives and thought leaders from a wide range of Chicago area businesses, financial institutions, and non-profits for an evening of brainstorming and strengthening alliances with the Smithsonian Regional Co-Chair Julie Scott and the Smithsonian Institution team of Karri Brady, Jennifer Berges and Renee May.
The evening was a success (“Exhilarating!” said one participant) and laid the foundation for future strategy sessions to make this dream of a new women’s history museum a reality. For the Center, it was a rewarding opportunity to support leaders whose mission-driven work of empowering women parallels our own.
If women’s history is American history, as the Smithsonian says, then history was being made that evening—and more will be written in gatherings to come.
