Let’s Get the American Women’s History Museum Back on Track 

In December 2020, Congress authorized the creation of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Nearly six years later, progress has stalled in Congress, delayed by disagreements over its location on the National Mall. Women’s History Month and America’s 250th birthday offer an ideal opportunity to reignite bipartisan support for the project. American history has been shaped by women’s labor and leadership, from the Revolution to the present day. That story deserves a permanent home. We need only see the fantastic attendance and national embrace of the African American museum and the Vietnam and World War II memorials, and others, to be reminded that these temples of memory have a powerful effect on the country. 

As the nation prepares to celebrate its semiquincentennial, Americans are reflecting on the Founding generation. But too often, the Revolution is still framed as a story of great men: George Washington’s army defeated the British at Yorktown, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin Franklin secured the French alliance.  

Women’s work did not take place on battlefields or in legislative halls, where they were, of course, not allowed. It happened in parlors, kitchens, boarding houses, and archives. It happened in decisions about which letters to save, which uniforms to preserve, and which stories to pass to future generations.  

Before the Treaty of Paris secured American independence in 1783, women were the keepers of our country’s historical record. Wives, mothers, and sisters saved letters from male family members on the front lines of the battle against the British. They patched and preserved uniforms and campaign flags, tucked them safely into trucks, and left these treasures to future generations. 

Women’s words also molded the earliest written history of the Revolution. In 1805, Mercy Otis Warren published the three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Warren’s definitive account of the founding period trumpeted a pro-Jefferson perspective, shaping political reputations and influencing how future generations understood the conflict. 

First ladies similarly played an integral role in burnishing presidential legacies. At her husband’s request, Martha Washington famously burned her correspondence with George after his death. Washington understood that future generations would carefully analyze his papers. He hired secretaries to catalog and preserve his writings, but culled the documents that clashed with the image he presented to the American people. Washington’s letters to Martha, now lost, likely contained the snark, humor, grudges, passions, and rage that make people three-dimensional: the sides of ourselves we show our loved ones. By burning these letters, Martha ensured the Americans would remember her husband as a marble bust—a larger-than-life figure—rather than a heroic but flawed, mortal man. 

More than a century later, Jacqueline Kennedy, a 34-year-old widow who had sat next to her husband when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, introduced the notion of “Camelot” as a metaphor for how Americans would memorialize the grace, glamor, and lost opportunity of her slain husband’s administration. Fiercely protective of her family’s image, she cemented, and at times burnished, how the country remembers John F. Kennedy. 

Beyond the White House, women built institutions to preserve their communities’ past. They formed coalitions and organizations to protect historic homes and local buildings, rightly believing that Americans could not fully understand their nation’s story without seeing the spaces where history was made. For example, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, founded in 1853, purchased and preserved George Washington’s home, which generations of Americans have since toured. And to this day, each state chapter of the Colonial Dames, founded in 1890, cares for a historic local building. 

On a personal level, women’s daily choices constructed the material and archival records for generations of historians. Women are the keepers of memories. In the eighteenth century, they documented births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths in their account books and Bibles. In the nineteenth century, they stitched family trees in needlepoint. After the advent of photography, women made scrapbooks with family photos and mementos. And women have mastered genealogy–connecting current generations to founding descendants, and finding lost family members.  

But women, as memory keepers, are, ironically, often forgotten. This work makes possible hereditary and civic societies, including the Society of the Cincinnati, the Daughters of the Revolution, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Colonial Dames, all of which commemorate the nation’s founding. 

Women are not just the keepers of memories, of course. Their achievements in science, politics, the emancipation of the enslaved, and their fight for their own rights are essential to American history. Today, women lead civic organizations, presidential libraries, history museums, and scholarly institutions across the country that preserve the American past. While these positions of authority were closed to women in the eighteenth century, women have been crafting our story from the beginning.  

As we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, Americans will ask what kind of country we are—and how we want to be remembered. That has always been, in part, a woman’s question. Women have been writing the nation’s story for 250 years now. They deserve a museum that celebrates that role. 

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