LADIES WHO LAUNCH
REJECTED SUMMER 2000

Over dinner at Anglers & Writers in Greenwich Village, Debra Michals, a doctoral candidate in the NYU history department, was describing a dream she had two years ago, after accepting a job as content director of the first national institution devoted entirely to women's history, The Women's Museum: An Institute for the Future, which opens in Dallas on September 29, during the Texas State Fair. "Gwyneth Paltrow was hired as my research assistant," recalled Michals, a statuesque woman with a long brown hair and a breathlessly intense manner, whose dreams have also featured appearances by Paul Michael Glaser, Tom Hanks and Coretta Scott King. “We constructed this women's history exhibit together, and the next day, I came back to look at it, and the man who was building it had made it into a Ted Danson exhibit. Ted is in this pink Cadillac convertible, and he's doing like this....” Michals waves her hand, pivoting at the elbow like a metronome. “He's like this tin Ted Danson guy, and he's waving at all these blonde bimbos, Playboy playmate-type people in bikinis, telling them to get in his car. Which they do!” She took a sip of Chardonnay. “The guy wants me to take blurbs about women's history and put them in the clouds around Ted Danson's head. And I say, ‘Are you kidding me? This flies in the face of the very point of a women's museum! This is insulting to women, this is insulting to Ted Danson!'” Michals leveled a dubious glance. “So then the guy says, ‘Does this mean you won't give us the history?"

The Women's Museum, which features text panels, high-tech electronic displays and historical artifacts (many borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution), has been spearheaded by a PR executive named Cathy Bonner, who since concocting the idea three years ago has managed to recruit a heavyweight board of directors, including former Governor Ann Richards and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, locate a building and raise $30 million—leapfrogging past similar projects that have been planned for Washington, D.C., San Francisco and New York. She turned to Whirlwind & Co., a design shop in Hell's Kitchen, to create the exhibits, and Whirlwind found Michals.

Although Dallas didn't immediately strike her as the ideal site for such a project, Michals eventually came to like the idea. “In a way, the fact that it's in Dallas makes it all the more radical,” she said. But as she struggled to reconcile her own vision with the more conservative sensibilities of the museum's Texan founders, the Gwyneth dream would begin to seem prophetic. One early area of contention was an exhibit called the Myth Maze, which Michals and her colleagues conceived as a space where museumgoers' gender biases would be systematically dismantled. “It was going to be a developmental life trip through all of the ideas that postulate what makes us female, from birth to death,” she explained. “It would be everything from ‘Blue is for boys; pink is for girls' to rites of passage like development of breasts, menstruation, loss of virginity, all up the line.” She sat back in her chair and shook her head. “Well, you can see where the Dallas Red-Alert Meter started flashing! It just wasn't playing with the focus groups. The feeling was, ‘I don't want to be next to my-fill in the blank-husband, wife, mother, father, sister, boyfriend when I read about menstruation.'”

Of particular concern to the board of directors was that the museum not be perceived as anti-male. “For instance, I wanted to mention how all embryos start out female, and after about nine weeks, the hormones kick in and sex is determined,” she recalled. “This is a scientific fact. Well, apparently, there were men who really flipped out about it. One man said, basically, ‘I know I didn't start life as a woman.' In the end, I think we pulled the whole entry.” As for a vintage “Male Chauvinist Pig” cartoon calendar from 1974, Michals doubts it will see the light of day. Likewise, references to sexual orientation—such as Michals' delicately worded mention that pioneering journalist Dorothy Thompson “had relationships with men and women”—have been excised. “They felt if the Texas market saw that somebody was a lesbian, they would not even care what else she did with her life, and they wouldn't take their kids,” Michals explained, adding, “Look, they know their market, I don't.” Local political considerations may also have been behind the deletion of a reference to activist Angela Davis from the historical time line and a request that Michals change the word “communist” to “socialist” in a time line entry on the Red Scare. In that latter instance, the Ph.D. candidate held her ground.

For the most part, a spirit of compromise prevailed. Michals' plan to include disgraced evangelist Amy Semple MacPherson and voodoo queen Marie Leveaux, as well as goddess worship and Wicca, in the religion exhibit prompted some hand-wringing, but when she guaranteed that mainstream faiths would be the primary focus, the Texans seemed mollified. And she was pleasantly surprised when her examination of the nuclear family as a postwar invention sailed through the vetting process without a hitch. She did encounter some heated resistance, however, to a reference to the shrinking average body size of Miss America contestants over the years (which, according to a Johns Hopkins study, now meets the World Health Organization's standard for malnutrition). As it happens, one of the Dallas-based curators is an avid fan of pageants, and one day, she and Michals had it out over lunch. “I wanted to show things like the Miss America protest of 1968,” Michals recalled, “and she wanted to show all the scholarships and the good things these women have done with their lives.” In the end, they'll both have their say. “Texas is pageant country,” she pointed out with a shrug.

Over time, Michals managed to reconcile herself to the regional climate. But two months before the scheduled opening, a showdown occurred. It centered, not unexpectedly, on the subject of abortion. At issue was the biographical sketch of Gloria Steinem, who is included in the museum's pantheon of thirty-seven “Unforgettable Women.” The text referred to a galvanizing event in the Ms. magazine founder's political development, a 1969 speak-out on abortion sponsored by the Redstockings that led Steinem to embrace the women's movement and to share the story of her own abortion. When the Texans cut the reference, Michals placed a call to Steinem's office. “I thought it was an important part of her history, and I wanted to see if Gloria agreed,” she said. Steinem did, and the line stayed. “You should have seen me dancing around my kitchen,” Michals said, although she admitted that some of her colleagues are “none too happy with me.”

Even so, she was still excitedly planning her trip to Dallas for the inaugural gala. “I went to Saks and got this gorgeous black Shelli Segal gown,” she said. “It's very Charlie's Angels.”

                                    — Aaron Gell