USA - Momentum Is Building for Museum of Women

WASHINGTON — A once-ailing effort to build a national women’s history museum on or near the National Mall has been given new life by a declaration of support from the House majority leader and the ascension of women to key committee posts in the Senate, supporters in both parties said Tuesday.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, a Democrat, and Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Republican, the two main sponsors of bill that would authorize exploration of a site for a museum, said at a House subcommittee hearing that they had revised the project so that it would rely on private donations instead of taxpayer money.

That addressed a main point of opposition raised as recently as 2010, when the House passed a bill and then Senate Republicans blocked it.

Both chambers have passed versions of the legislation over the last decade, but never during the same Congress. Some Republicans have raised doubts about whether the group behind the museum project could raise the estimated $500 million needed to build it. They also pointed to the dozens of museums devoted to women’s history throughout the United States.

Ms. Maloney, who first proposed the project in the late 1990s, said that other museums are devoted to women in particular areas of accomplishment — the arts, for example — but that there is not one that chronicles the overall contribution of women, in politics, civic life, war, science and other fields.

In fact, she said in an interview: “I don’t know of a national museum anywhere in any of the capitals of the world that chronicles the achievements of women. I find that astonishing.”

Some anti-abortion groups have also voiced concern that the museum would be a platform for advocating abortion rights. The addition of Ms. Blackburn, a well-known opponent of abortion rights, as a lead sponsor might have helped ease that concern.

But the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, now says he also supports the bill and will present it for a vote this year, a spokesman said on Tuesday. Mr. Cantor’s support was reported earlier by The Hill newspaper.

On the Senate side, the Energy Committee, where a similar bill has been presented, is now led by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana and a longtime co-sponsor of the bill, after the previous chairman, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, switched to the Finance Committee.

Adding to the sense of momentum, the House bill has gained 37 sponsors since the beginning of the year and now has 85. The bill now goes to the full House Committee on Natural Resources.

A feasibility study is expected to cost between $1 million and $3 million. Although it would be financed with private money, it needs congressional approval because the group hopes to build the museum on federal land, with one potential site near the center of the National Mall.

Joan Wages, president of the group overseeing the project, said it had raised $14 million, most of it in small donations.

“This will be a museum funded by women, for women,” Ms. Blackburn said.

_________________________________________________________