A National Women's History Museum in D.C.

[Tx4obama]

Last edited Sun Apr 8, 2012, 05:58 PM - Edit history (1)

Dec 13, 2011
In January Streep takes the role of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady; she's also taken up an important cause, pushing Congress to fund construction of the National Women's History Museum.

*** A FOUR PAGE GOOD READ (regarding the museum and the controversy/problems)***

Project To Create National Women's Museum Plagued By Conflicts Of Interest
04/ 8/2012
National Women's History Museum Makes Little Progress After 16 Years
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Streep believes so strongly in the project that she has pledged $1 million, of which she has already given $400,000. Upon learning of HuffPost's findings, she expressed sadness during a candid phone interview.

Asked whether she regretted getting involved in the project, the actress turned philosophical.

"We enter into these commitments in good faith," she said, "you have to."

Streep said she isn't giving up on the museum, not while the contributions to American history and the struggle for equal rights of more than half the U.S. population remain relegated to small, regional museums.

As she reminded audiences at a 2010 museum fundraising dinner in Washington, "There is a postal museum, a spy museum and a textile museum. There's even a building that's a museum about buildings. But there is no national women's museum."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/08/national-womens-history-museum_n_1408662.html?page=3

Meryl Streep's next project: A national women's history museum

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Women's place in history is a subject on Streep's mind of late. Her next off-screen project is the National Women's History Museum, an entity that exists so far only in cyberspace and that the actress is trying to get erected in brick and mortar on a site adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“History until the 20th century was written by one member of the human family and it wasn’t the mother,” Streep said in a mid-December interview in New York City with her “Iron Lady” director, Phyllida Lloyd. “It was dad. That’s who wrote history and ... what was important? Movements of armies, sovereignty of nations, all sorts of things. But women were there all along and they have incredible stories that we don’t know anything about.”

Financing for the $400-million museum is being raised privately — Streep donated $1 million to the endeavor — but congressional approval is required for the location, which would place the building near institutions such as the National Air and Space Museum, the Museum of the American Indian and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial. A bill to allow the museum has passed committees in the House and the Senate and is awaiting action by the full legislative bodies.

“It’s a political football, I gather,” Streep said. “It’s a thing that everybody in Congress agrees with but then they attach it to something that no one agrees with .... It would be a beacon to women all over the world, because there really is no such museum. There are cottage museums — there’s a quilt museum, there’s a cowgirl museum.”

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/12/meryl-streeps-next-project-a-national-womens-history-museum.html

National Women's History Museum: http://www.nwhm.org/

[niyad]

1. the fact that we still do not have this museum is a disgrace. when it was first proposed,

I had hoped to see it in just a few years. . . sighhhhh.