Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Focuses on Forgotten Figures

Everyone who carried a bag lunch to school has engaged with the work of Margaret E. Knight. A 19th-century American inventor, who developed a machine to automate the production of flat-bottomed paper bags, Knight had to file a lawsuit to receive the patent for her work after a male engineer tried to steal her design. When she died in 1914, she had 27 patents to her name — but today, few have heard of her.

A new exhibition, “Becoming Visible,” the inaugural virtual show presented by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, dives into Knight’s contributions and those of other women who have been overlooked. The actor Rosario Dawson, who is on the museum’s board, narrates.

That Knight was forgotten is “not exceptional, but representative of systemic issues across women’s history,” said Elizabeth Harmon, the digital curator of the museum, whose show is about five American women who changed U.S. history — and were later generally excluded from cultural memory and school curriculums. “It’s like women’s history has been written in disappearing ink,” she said.

The exhibition — which uses expert interviews, objects and archives from across the Smithsonian — begins on Friday, International Women’s Day, and offers the first taste of what viewers can expect from the institution. Although Congress approved plans for the museum in 2020, it is still about a decade away from opening and does not yet have a site or collection.

Led by the interim director Melanie A. Adams, it is expected to announce a permanent leader in the coming weeks, a spokeswoman said. Last summer, its founding director, Nancy Yao, withdrew from her appointment following an investigation into her handling of sexual harassment claims while leading the Museum of Chinese in America in New York. (A Smithsonian spokeswoman at the time said that Yao resigned for family reasons.)