Decolonizing Feminism in Women's Museums: Women's Museums in an Ecology of Feminisms

Women's Museums as a new category of museums were first initiated in Europe and North America at the beginning of the 1980s. This period is also distinguished by the activities of the UN Decade of Women. In critical relation to the UN Women’s Conferences and the transnational exchanges they occasioned, Third World Feminism, decolonial, and race-critical feminist thought emerged as important frameworks for feminist activism. Yet, in hindsight these developments appear to have had little interconnection, and the extent to which the specific bodies of knowledge and the insights of Third World Feminism were excluded from a new feminist museum practice and a new women-centered museum pedagogy needs to be acknowledged. Introducing the notion of an ecology of feminisms in order to characterize how multiple feminisms can co-exist, support and contradict each other, we bring some of the insights of decolonial feminisms into dialogue with women’s museums and their specific history through two case studies: the Women’s Museum in Bonn, Germany and the National Museum of Women and the Arts in Washington DC, both of which were founded in 1981.