By Allison Gilbert for CNN
The Smithsonian describes itself as the “world’s largest museum, education, and research complex,” housing nearly 157 million objects, of which less than 1% are on view at its 21 museums. Yet its vast collections are unsearchable by gender. Conducting research to find examples of “women in journalism” (or women working in any endeavor) is generally fruitless. The result? It’s nearly impossible to discover women whose names we don’t yet know.
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| Photo: Library of Congress |
Thankfully, this is changing. The Smithsonian acknowledges that the cataloging of its own materials has been a major factor in women’s stories remaining untold. “The terminology and the systems weren’t there and set up to recognize them,” according to Melanie Adams, newly appointed interim director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and reported here for the first time. “We now have to fix those systems in order for these stories to be visible.”
Leaders at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, created by an Act of Congress in December 2020, point to a massive systemic challenge, as nearly every category of “metadata” — the data about data that enables users to search files — clashes with century-old frameworks that simply wrote women out of the historical record.
This work is critical. According to a major women’s history and social studies research summit, only 24% of the historical figures taught in K-12 classrooms are women. The National Monument Audit found that 3 of the 50 people most frequently honored with public memorials and monuments are female. And just about 1 in 5 biographical entries on English-language Wikipedia focus on women.
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