The National Women’s History Museum is an online museum dedicated to women’s history. It named Frédérique Irwin as its new president and CEO on 17 April 2023.
Founded in 1996, the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) is an innovative cultural institution and online museum. It is dedicated to uncovering, interpreting, and celebrating women’s diverse contributions to society. It reaches more than five million visitors every year through its online content and educational programming.
A renowned leader in women’s history education, the museum brings to life the countless untold stories of women throughout history. It serves as a space for all to inspire, experience, collaborate, and amplify women’s impact—past, present, and future. NWHM strives to fundamentally change the way women and girls see their potential and power.
“I am thrilled that Frédérique is joining the National Women’s History Museum at this dynamic time,” said Susan Whiting, the museum’s board chair, at the time of the announcement. “She is a proven leader with the CEO experience and the vision to help us bring to life the remarkable role women have played in the American story.”
“Now is the time to bring more stories of local women’s history, tied to the national narrative, to communities around the country,” Irwin said when her tenure as president was announced
A few months into her new role, blooloop speaks to Irwin about the museum, and her goals moving forward.
Frédérique Irwin
Irwin previously served as managing director of impact strategy at the Sorenson Impact Center. Before this, she was the founder and CEO of Her Corner. This is a company that connects women and equips them with the contacts, resources and support to scale their businesses. During her time at Her Corner, she also expanded the company across multiple US cities.
In her new role, Irwin has plans to: “Bring to life the museum’s vision to inspire women, girls, and all people with past and current stories of women in their own communities who have forged paths before them”.
She has a traditional business background, an entrepreneurial interest and many years of experience in management consulting.
“I have started quite a few companies,” she comments. “I found that it was really hard to grow small businesses. And I realised that if it was difficult for me, with consulting experience and an MBA, how much harder must it be for women starting companies without that background?”
This was around 2011:
“At this time in the US, an increasing number of women were graduating from higher education, and an increasing number of women were starting companies. It wasn’t the case that these were people who were uneducated or who didn’t know how to grow these businesses. Yet the same business started by a man was around four times as likely to succeed than a woman’s company.”
A new role with the National Women’s History Museum
This observation was the impetus for Irwin to start the women’s networking community Her Corner:
“I have always had this belief that if you bring women together, they’re highly collaborative. They learn from one another,” she says. “I have always been an advocate for women’s empowerment. Since I was a little girl, I have had this idea of building confidence in women, helping them see that they can achieve, pursue, and stand up for themselves, whatever it might be.”
That path led her, ultimately, to the National Women’s History Museum:
“I had a wonderful role before coming, here with wonderful people on my team. I really wasn’t looking to make a move, but the more I learned about the mission and the vision for this organisation [in conjunction with] the state of affairs for women in the United States right now, I felt this deep sense of almost obligation, and certainly purpose, to come to lead this organisation.
“I’m really happy to be here, especially at this moment in time.”
The role of NWHM
The museum started 26 years ago:
“One of the things that is interesting is that when it started, although there are 35,000 museums in the United States, not a single one was dedicated to or included the full scope of women’s achievements,” she observes:
“When it was started over 25 years ago, it was a little bit ahead of its time in that while it wanted a physical space, the founding members were not willing to wait for that space to be developed. They decided to create an online repository, an online museum, while also pursuing a physical space.”
In the United States, she adds:
“Only 15% of people in our textbooks today are women. If you look around at the statues in the United States, only 8% of them are women. And that is today. You can imagine that over 25 years ago, it wasn’t any better. So these women decided to start this national museum to reach teachers and educators, women and girls, people across the country, bringing those stories through an online presence.
“That online presence has been extraordinarily valuable over the last 25 years. While today in 2023 that might seem a little odd, 25 years ago it was quite a modern approach.”
An online approach
Today, the website receives over five million visitors a year. 55,000 members continue to support the museum and participate. Online there are more than 200 original biographies of women that people can look up by location, geography, or area of interest. The website also has 30 different online exhibits:
“Educators can also pull from that,” Irwin says.
“The team worked hard before my time to get our congress to approve a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and, from our perspective, we feel very happy that there will finally be an actual National Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.”
Most such museums tend, she points out, to be object versus story-based. Additionally:
“It could, unfortunately, take 10 years for that museum to be open. It’s a tall order to wait 10 years and hope that some young girl or some woman will make her way to Washington, DC, walk through the door of that future museum, and be inspired to do something. So, we thought about what we wanted our role to be.
“We are going to have involvement in the development of that future museum. But in the interim, for the next five to ten years, we’re taking a decentralised approach. That means that rather than building our own brick-and-mortar physical space, we’re partnering with existing cultural institutions to bring exhibits of local women and girls to those cities, and tying that to a national narrative.
“Imagine you live anywhere in the USA that’s not Washington DC. You will be able to visit one of these exhibits, and hear stories about women from your city or from your state, who are also highly relevant to a national story.”
New in-person exhibition from the National Women’s History Museum
When a child can learn about someone from their own communities it completely changes their paradigm of what they think they can achieve:
“Our first version of this opened in partnership with DC Public Libraries. We opened a beautiful exhibit at the MLK library called We Who Believe in Freedom: Black Feminist DC.”
The museum’s inaugural in-person exhibition opened in March at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and is free to the public and available through September 2024.
“It’s about Black feminists from Washington DC,” she adds. “What is inspiring is that it highlights more than 20 women that you don’t normally hear about. People like Loretta J. Ross, a reproductive rights activist who has an incredible personal story.
“Telling these stories that are tied to things that are still going on, whether it’s civil rights or women’s rights, is a reminder that there have been women before us who have been out there standing up for these causes for a long time. It is a reminder that we are not alone, that we can do this.
“It is a beautiful thing. They have these posters in the windows. I was walking up to the opening of the exhibit. It must have been around five o’clock; people were going back and forth from their commute to work. I would see these women who were walking down the street that they walked down all the time. They would look at the windows, at these quotes from these incredible black women.
“I would see these women stopping in their tracks and reading these quotes. It was just beautiful. As far as I understand, it is the first time there has ever been an exhibit dedicated to Black women telling that story.”
Honouring remarkable women
Also in March, the museum hosted its Women Making History Awards in Washington, DC. Meryl Streep and Viola Davis served as the event’s honorary co-chairs.
“That has been going on for over 12 years,” Irwin explains. “The March event marked the end of Women’s History Month. We have honoured so many remarkable women – the Honourable Rosie Rios, is one example. She was the 43rd Treasurer of the United States. While she was there, she initiated the efforts to place a portrait of a woman on U.S. currency.
“When you look at our currency in the United States, there are very few women on it. What is remarkable – and I think this is one of the things that Rosie Rios shared – is the women that feature, such as Lady Liberty, aren’t even real.”
“Then this year we honoured several women who are inspiring for a variety of different reasons. Eleanor Holmes Norton, for instance, has been fighting on behalf of the District of Columbia and for women for many, many years, serving in the legislature or the government.”
A Black, feminist lawyer, as DC’s longest-serving Congressional representative, during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, she worked with SNCC to register Black voters. In public office and the courtroom, Holmes Norton has advanced the rights of Black communities and all women.
Further recipients include civil rights activist Willie Pearl Mackey King; actress, producer and humanitarian Sharon Stone; actress, activist and ambassador Uma Thurman; and Ashley Graham, pioneering supermodel, designer, entrepreneur and body positivity speaker.
“They are all interesting women selected for a variety of reasons in terms of inspiring people in whatever area they are in – not exclusively in STEM or in government or politics.”
Currency, statues and more
Returning to the Honourable Rosie Rios’s efforts to have women depicted on US currency, she says:
“It is an example of this subliminal message that women and girls get that they have been left out. They just aren’t there. Not only have we been left out of so many stories and so much history and social studies in education, but we’re also actually left out of things that you come across daily. Things like stories, currency, statues.”
Then there is the enduring gender pay gap:
“If you look at higher education and the number of women coming out with bachelor’s degrees or out of graduate programs, in terms of graduation rates, it is quite equitable. Yet the pay gap remains.
“When you start looking at historically marginalised populations, it’s even worse. Again, you ask yourself, well, what does it take to find the confidence to stand up for yourself and ask for more? I think it takes the knowledge that others have done it before you. When there are role models, it shows you that you are not the first and that people have done this before.”
Online model makes the National Women’s History Museum accessible
A major benefit of the fact the museum is online is the fact it is so accessible.
“It has 600,000 followers on social media,” Irwin says. “What I love about it is that if you are interested in the sciences, or a particular topic, you can find that.”
Key partnerships with cultural institutions are at the top of her list:
“We know that this exhibit is open for 18 months. But we already have to start thinking about where we go next, about what the next city will be, and about the next partnership. I’m very interested in developing an approach to selecting not just the right city, but the right partner. It could be another public library, it could be a cultural institution.
“The museum is already part of a national coalition of 70 partners that have a commitment to the success of the museum. So, I am thinking about who these coalition members are and how can we work together with them to find the synergies between their values, their objectives, and their mission, and ours.”
Working in partnership
She also thinks about partners in terms of who has worked to support the museum from a philanthropic perspective:
“From that perspective, we have a lot of different partners. We have partners at the corporate level who are truly committed to D&I [diversity & inclusion] and erasing implicit bias, and they want to be part of what we’re doing. We have partners who, for example, want to support the exhibit that we just opened. If you’re a child in an under-served neighbourhood where there aren’t a whole lot of resources, there can be barriers to actually getting to the exhibit, even if it’s in the same city, or not very far.”
This is where these partners can help:
“We have partners who want to make sure that they can help amplify the exhibit’s impact, and that we can measure the impact. All of this only matters if the kids and the young people we can’t otherwise reach actually see it.”
Reaching under-served communities
In terms of ensuring those under-served communities don’t miss out, she adds:
“We are working now with a whole set of partners for whom that is implicitly aligned to their values. We are breaking it down where we can say, per class, if we include this number of children, the cost of transportation and lunch, ‘this is what it costs’. And we are working with organizations that say, ‘Great, I’ll do 10 of those’”
“We are also starting to think about this at a national level. What about the kids who care about Black feminists, but perhaps they’re in another city? Can we take a hybrid virtual component of the exhibit to those children in cities that we may not get to right away? Again, we just cannot wait.”
Irwin’s goals for the National Women’s History Museum
Although Irwin has not been in the role long, she has begun her leadership by strategising 30, 60, and 90-day plans:
“I come from a strategy background. I’m not a museum person,” she says. “And so I think it’s fair to say that the reason that the museum asked me to step into this role is to accelerate its growth into markets across the country.
“We have phenomenal people on our team. We have educators and historians who can help me understand why this exhibit over another one. I honestly want to get out into the markets to reach as many women, girls, and interested people as we can. If you ask me how I’m going to measure success, it’s going to be by looking at our reach.”
“We haven’t defined yet what the exact outcome of that will be. I could imagine that some of the outcome is increasing confidence, perhaps an increase in social economic mobility. The long-term outcome can be enormous.”
Accordingly, she explains:
“One of the first things I’m doing is setting us to work on, what is it? Why do we do this? What is the outcome we want to see, other than just providing access to these stories? And what happens when this young girl – or anyone – gets that access? What is the outcome?
“Having defined that, we will then work backwards to measure and report on it. That’s how I’m thinking about it.”
