In 2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.
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But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job.
But….
There seems to be a troubling common denominator here. The vast majority of the women in these positions fit a certain mold. They come pre-stamped and processed. They are monochrome, feminist, left-leaning women schooled in the progressive agenda.
That agenda might be summed up this way: they are the products of left-leaning universities where life is seen through a lens of oppressor and the oppressed. Feminist and gender ideology is also a big part of the mix, and so suddenly you have heretofore great cultural institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia bowing before the latest left-wing craze to come down the pike.
The Athenaeum used to be a unique place. Once an institution of great cultural impact, it has now been “democratized” in a weedy grassroots way — thanks to the death of many of the classically educated old white men on the board and the institution’s takeover by a board of political progressives, all inspired by female leadership.
What happened to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia reminds me very much of what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has turned into: a museum too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.”
The Athenaeum’s cultural offerings — lectures and receptions — has a largely woke focus. An author like Lionel Shriver, who wrote “A Better Life,” a novel about migrants who destroy a New York American family, would never be invited to speak there. That’s because there’s an ideological test every author and speaker must pass before being given the chance to appear before an audience there. This is cancel culture hiding behind a polite female smile; it’s censorship in the name of programming.
One Athenaeum offering slated for December is a talk by Bench Ansfield, an Assistant History Professor at Temple University who uses “they” pronouns. On videos Ansfield appears to be of indeterminate sex — the slanted little bun on the top of “they’s” head and “they’s” choice of intricately designed shirts suggest female, but the voice suggests otherwise.
Now, I am no enemy of androgyny. The hyper-masculine male culture in the 1970s needed a huge dose of David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Lou Reed theatricality, but that’s not what is happening today. Today, the fun theater of Bowie has been exchanged for gender polemics as serious as Marxism.
By leftist standards, I’m sure the quality of Ansfield’s work is noteworthy. (Ansfield’s book won the Athenaeum’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.)
One must not forget that these prize-winning works are all judged by leftist literary standards, so if you are on the wrong editorial page, you’ll never be on their list to win an award.
(Ansfield’s area of expertise in “their” latest book, “Born in Flames,” is a look into “late-twentieth-century transformations in race and capitalism.”)
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While progressive, white liberal women are having their moment in the sun, the damage they often do in the institutions they control has negative consequences.
This brings us to the 162-page report issued on July 4 by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which accused the Smithsonian museum of being “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
The council faulted the National Museum of American History with downplaying the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history. It also charged that the museum engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien,” and transgender activism, and accused the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming, and teaching resources.
This is what progressive museums under the direction of leftist female academicians do, and it should come as no surprise to anybody.
During a heated House DOGE subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Nancy Mace pressed Smithsonian Director Dr. Anthea Hartig on whether men can become women, what defines a woman, and how many genders there are.
Like most progressive women when they are asked such questions, Hartig refused to answer Mace when pressed on these questions. Throughout it all, Hartig was amazingly poker-faced and kept repeating the all-too familiar lie that the Smithsonian is a non-partisan institution, while neglecting to explain why a 2020–2023 exhibit there included a diary from a 13-year-old girl exploring issues including gender identity.
Gender identity, along with ICE and immigration, are the two chandelier issues of the left. For her part, Hartig seemed to have no knowledge of the gender exhibit and stated that she’d have to check into that.
Shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, wrote a letter in support of Hartig:
We stand with Dr. Hartig…. The Berks remain steadfast in its commitment to inclusive feminist historical scholarship and the collaborative networks that make this work possible.
If only it were possible to bring the House DOGE subcommittee hearings on Capitol Hill to Philadelphia to get institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia to answer a few questions.
Image generated by ChatGPT.