Understanding of history and its impact on the world today. To develop an Educational Initiative for young people, students, and adults. She recently led the historical campaign, which raised more than 100 million. Under her directions the New York Historical society has lost groundbreaking exhibitions. In recent years she has been honored with the woman of distinction metal, the deans metal in 2005, education and student advocacy award. And many many other awards we do not have time to read today because we want to hear what she has to say. She also has done research that focus on the creation of the historical narrative. Without further a do, louise mirrer. Thank you for organizing this panel. As some of you may be aware of the New York Historical society has been developing a brandnew center for the study of womens history. So i am very interested today to learn about the work of my fellow panelist and also to hear the views of those of you in the audience. At the New York Historical society, one of our greatest challenges in thinking of how to test advance the very complex story of womens history is a public that ranges from 200,000 Public School students to learn history with us each year chiefly with the aim of improving their performance on the various statewide benchmark examinations, to a demographic that skews on one hand to older visitors and on the other toward children and their parents to scholars who are pushing for the frontiers of knowledge in their particular fields of interest and study. So we have a challenge of addressing this story we decided after a good bit of discussion and debate that we would do what we have always done best, to play to the strength of our institution. Those are our collections, our colleagues, our locations, and our donors. I want to say a few words about each one of these and then i would like to show you a very brief demonstration of where we are in our work. The seeds of our determination to create this new center for the study of womens history resides in one of our most important Decorative Arts collection. A collection that consists of 130 two exquisite pieces that were given to us in the 1980s by the new york dentist. Under any circumstances our collection would be worthy of its own display. Our interest in this instance was not driven by asked that x but by the story behind the lamp area less than a decade ago three scholars made an astonishing discovery, and that is many of tiffanys lamps and many of those in our collection as well were designed by women. Ahead of the all Women Glass Cutting Department was a young woman who originally came to new york from a small town in ohio to try to become an artist. She studied briefly at the metropolitan museum of art and was offered a job at tiffanys studios in manhattan. She became one of the best compensated women in new york city. I know it wont come as a surprise to this group that by 1903 her male colleagues were threatening to strike to downgrade her all women department. And then following the custom of her day in 1909 she left tiffany studios when she got married. The discoveries gave such rich evidence of womens history and certainly of womens struggle for it and advancement towards full participation in the American Society was the motivation enough to think more broadly about how we could connect to the story of womens history with our institution. We reasoned we could develop a spectacular tiffany display that would dazzle our multiple audiences and tell this story we thought it would be possible to use this as a springboard for both looking backwards towards the earlier Suffragist Movement which new york city Public School students have to learn about, and forward toward women eventual securing of the right to vote. We saw the potential given our tiffany collection for telling the story of womens history and we hired a great architect to design a great all Glass Gallery for us that would be infused with the story of womens history focused on the late 20th century did new york. I said colleagues are another great strength of our institution. One of my colleagues is actually one of the three scholars that made this discovery. And i also want to say we have been able to depend on other great colleagues. And we formed an Advisory Committee headed by our collie to the north of columbia. Location is another great strength of our institution and we consider ourselves to be more of an American History museum than a local Historical Society. We are pretty good at telling local history. As claridges ghost story was a great new york story and it wasnt all that different from the stories of other women at the time, some of them completely unsought, but others quite it better known, for example frances perkins, eleanor roosevelt, that we would do what we have done before quite successfully, develop a multimedia film. This story would be unfamiliar to many of our visitors and particularly to our students but would provide a kind of orientation to what they went this what it would see on display. We hired the film maker who helped us with the film we have on film on view in our auditorium. Im going to show you a brief trailer at the end of my remarks for that. Donors are another great strength of our institution. Our trustees are smart and knowledgeable and very generous. I want to say a few words about a couple of them. The chair of our board at the time that we began developing this project, roger was always interested in the story of mary driscoll. He became something of an expert on late 19th century new york women because his wifes biographer was writing a book on the topic. He became a great champion for this project. Roger was succeeded by a pom as chair of our board pam chaffler and she became very engaged in the project and gave us a major lead gift to make it happen. This all came together in a way that allowed our ambitions to evolve now from telling ow story in glass and words, in film into telling our story in a fullblown center for the study of womens history. And we apply to the Mellon Foundation for a grant that would enable us to attract a cadre of fellows and scholars working in the field who would Work Together with New York HistoricalSociety Staff to make this now great grand ambition come true. We envisaged seminars, and lively discussions, and debates, and enriching the audience that we already enjoy and have, which is a great audience of scholars who use our collections. Happily, we were successful with our application to the Mellon Foundation. And perhaps some of you will be interested in joining us as a fellow, or you may make introductions to others who might be, and were actually beginning our recruitment right now. So were in a very, very exciting point, and we actually will be moving forward with a physical project, which consumes substantially the fourth floor of our institution, and an intellectual project, which is a center that, as i said, will be pushing forward the frontiers of scholarship. Grand ambition. But a good one. So, i brought with me a very brief trailer, very conceptual for the film that were working on. Im going to show it. Id like you to bear in mind that it is very conceptual. Gives that very small hors doeuvre of what it is were thinking of doing. I hope it will be a pretext for you to help us as we as we move forward because this is very much a work in progress. So im going to press the space bar and magically. Good. New York Historical society will soon open its stunning new tiffany gallery. In an intimate, yet transporting theater setting, new york women in a new light will take you into the surprising history behind the art. music music we join the story in the first two decades of the 20th century. Forces welling up across the country are intensifying and unleashed in new york, setting up conditions for profound change. Out of this dazzling, turbulent, and transformative moment in new yorks history, a generation of women, working without the vote, take actions that will affect the course of the nation. Many young women like claire are driscoll, a talented artist from ohio, are drawn to new york to pursue opportunities now open to unmarried women. Others, working in tenement buildings and halls of power, on the factory floor, and in settlement houses, on a stage, and in the street, set in motion changes that will reverberate across the 20th century. Until now, many of these stories have been largely lost to history. As the story evolves, we witness a unique time in our countrys history, and meet women who seize that moment and change the course of a nation. Finally, we hear the voices of leaders on similar stages today, reflecting on the creative inspiration and insight we may draw from these remarkable figures in American History. [applause] so our next speaker is karen offen. Karen offen whoa. Is that okay . Everybody . Is a historian and independent scholar at stanford university. She publishes on the history of modern new york, especially france and its global influence with reference to family gender, and the relative status of women womens history and many others. In 2010 she was elected to the bureau of the International Committee for the Historical Sciences based in paris. Shes a founder and past secretary treasurer of the International Federation for research in womens history. And its past president of the western association of women historians. She has held fellowships from the johns Simon Guggenheim memorial fellowship for a study in research to the Rockefeller Foundation as well as the neh. She has directed four disciplinary neh summer seminars focusing on the women question for college teacher, she has organized a cluster of original historical text and translation and codirected one, another seminar on motherhood and the nation state at stanford in 2002. She is a widely published author, and scholarly reviews in many languages. Many of you, im sure, no doubt have read her foundational article defining feminism and comparative historical analysis that came out in 1988. Her latest monograph was well latest until the one she just finished was a european feminism 1700 to 1950 a political history which came up with stanford in 2000. And has just been translated in french, as well. In addition to that work and many other articles and collected volumes she publiced an edited volume globalizing feminism 1789 to 1945 which i highly recommend to anybody in this field. She lives in stanford and there she just completed a book on the women question debate in france. You have a title for us . Debating the woman question. Debating the woman question. Wourt further he ado and of course the other important thing to say about karen offen is that she was involved and still is involved in the development of a project in San Francisco, an International WomensHistory Museum, and i think we will hear about that now. Thank you, maria. Can you all hear me . Okay. Thanks for the nice introduction, and also for inviting me to be on this panel. The reason im actually here is not because of the his for cal scholarship piece but because of my experience at the International Museum of women. From 1998 to 2011 i was a member of the working board of the International Museum of women, a private initiative based in San Francisco i played a key role in the launch of what has since become a Virtual Museum at www. Imow. Org. Which since march of this year this last year has joined forces with the equally innovative global fund for women. Which many of you may be familiar with. Coming to the project and to the board as a scholar historian in 1999 i received a crash course in museum building, museum culture, and museum costs. I chaired the committee for over five years until we hired a Vice President , paid, of course, who took over those duties and brought in professional curators and educators. I worked closely with our founder and president Elizabeth Colton on every aspect of development from concept definition to site location to fundraising, to working with, guiding and educating exhibition content developers to interviewing architects and Exhibition Development firms and to crafting the interpretive plan for the potential brick and mortar museum project. By 2004 we thought we had all the pieces in place. Site, architects, content developer, project manager, et cetera. Then, we sent the divers down underneath the pier on the San Francisco waterfront. And when they came up and filed their reports, it became clear that this pier, which belonged to the San FranciscoPort Authority had major structural problems. A little louder please. Had major structural problems underneath. And the estimate for retro fitting the sub structure was somewhere running around 20 million. We decided to rethink the project at that point because private donors are not terribly interested in funding substructures. And you cant put plaques on steel beams that are under water. That anyone will ever be able to see, unless they happen to have a diving suit. So we spent nine months rethinking the project. And what we came up with eventually was a very different direction for the museum, an avantgarde virtually project that has since won honors from the museum community. And we have now no collection, no objects, but we have a huge number of exhibits, and things that are available on the website, and the exhibits that we have put together economica a number of others, are all Still Available on that website. So you can see them from wherever are you in the world if you have an internet connection. Elizabeth and i copublished a handful of articles about our prob lick internationally including in the Unesco Museum International and in spain and italy. Our staff has developed Worldwide Networks and has been coproducing events with partners on the ground all over the world. So, thats the background. Next we come to the context questions. And we took a stand for Simultaneous Development of both the structure and the content. As a ph. D. Historian and published author ive also confronted the joys and difficulties of incorporating for a lay audience Sophisticated Concepts such as gender analysis. That have developed during the years with the International Womens history scholarship. I have wrestled with the problem of how to convey, not always satisfactorily, deep scholarship as sound bites or short paragraphs. And Museum People deal with this sort of thing all the time. But for historians who write long books and articles, it is kind of a new experience. And also the question of how to make content entertaining, as well as educational. The businessification of the museum if you will. I helped establish a womens history Advisory Board in parallel with the Global Council of women world leaders. And helped organize exhibit content development in europe and the United States. Which brought together various interesting people not all of bhom were historians clearly but from the world of museum culture. I quickly learned, after attempting to educate not only nonwomens history people, but especially the museum staff as it was growing, that what we really needed were several fulltime womens history experts in the office. Working hand in glove with the administrative and curette oriole staff and with the interns in particular to imbed a historical consciousness which many of them did not have. To inform and integrate the most interesting and pertinent findings of womens history and not least to teach fact checking. And double sourcing to young people who would rather consult wikipedia to read substantive books by scholars. Without historians on site our project relentlessly morphed toward a contemporary social action project targeted primarily at young adult women. This is not a bad thing. But because there were no womens historians on staff, imow did not become the womens History Museum that it might have become and Elizabeth Colton and i wanted it to become. What i see now about imow is that our online exhibits are making history. For contemporary women around the world. And our website has hundreds of thousands of visitors annually and going up. The material archives on this website is spectacular, and it will in its turn become a historical resource, including for teachers, and weve already had courses that spaced around some of the exhibit material. You should check out the exhibits, imagining ourselves, women power and politics economica which i mentioned, mama, and muslima. Were currently working on an exhibition that has to do with s. T. E. M. , women in technology, science and engineering around the world. And that i think will be out pretty soon although im not involved in it. Now my small but continuing contribution to the womens history aspect is linked to imows blog for blueprint which since 2007 ive published a periodic blog called cleo talks back. I had