Women's History Month

Floor Speech

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Ms. ADAMS. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. De La Cruz for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, on the final day of Women's History Month, I rise tonight to highlight the value of the Women's History Museum. Karen Staser founded the museum in 1995 with the aim of addressing the significant amount of women's history that was missing from our Nation's Capital and museums, including the Smithsonian Institution.

During the museum's startup years, the museum's first project was to oversee the restoration of the iconic women's suffrage statute which resides in our Capitol rotunda to this day.

As an artist of 40 years and as someone who has actually started a small museum gallery in my home State, I am very concerned about museums. This museum also organized a traveling exhibition on women's suffrage, launched a popular newsletter called ``A Different Point of View,'' created a bipartisan Honorary Congressional Advisory Council, and testified before Congress.

Since its founding, the museum has played an integral role in uplifting and celebrating the many women in history who have had an impact on our society, women like my mentor, artist, and teacher, the late Eva Hamlin Miller. Too often, these names are erased from our history books, our K-12 education, and even our museums.

The Women's History Museum is a space where women can go to feel inspired and motivated to dream big. It is a place where women's legacies can live on, be celebrated, and not forgotten.

One such woman I want to mention, Alma Thomas, comes to mind. She was an African-American artist who is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. She attended Howard University and went on to be an educator at Shaw Junior High School here in D.C.

She had a deep understanding of the importance of the arts in children's self-expression and created enrichment programs for her students. Her most influential work included her abstract paintings which she developed later in her life. She was the first African- American woman to be featured in a solo exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art and also the first to have her art displayed in the White House's permanent collection.

We need more representation of African-American artists like Alma Thomas and Eva Hamlin Miller in the Women's History Museum. To exclude their work is to miss significant parts of our country's history and contradict the very founding principle of the museum.

I close again by honoring all of the women of our past who had an influential hand in shaping the present. Wholeheartedly, I support the work of the Women's History Museum. As always, I look forward to working with my colleagues to continue to uplift the work and the contributions of women, not just for Women's History Month but every month and every day of every year.

Ms. De La CRUZ. Maloy).

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