This would include collecting and displaying, when possible, stories, customs, and artifacts, and conducting education about menstruation. Menstrual education would take the form of museum tours, visits to schools and other organizations, this Web site, and compact disks and paper publications.
Education would take the forms mentioned above. In case I die before the museum is located in a permanent public exhibit in the U.S.A., everything (roughly 4000 items, some unique) goes to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, Australia's largest. The curator of medicine there, Megan Hicks (see and read about her), visited me in October of 2000 and told me about her success in creating a traveling history of contraception that toured Australia; I feel the museum would be in good hands.
Menstruation, including at least one actual menstrual hut (and let's let visitors actually sit in it!), history of advertising, customs, objects associated with menstruation, etc. The general history of the relationship between women and medicine Current topics of women's health, which could change quickly - weekly? - to address important topics such as estrogen supplements, breast cancer, etc.
Displays, which would occupy the bulk of the museum's space Bookstore and gift shop (I read a museum study that concluded that museum visitors, after a month or two, most vividly remembered the gift shop!!) Café with garden - and German pastry! Archive and library Meeting rooms and auditorium for local women's groups and performances.
In the summer of 1998 a married couple from England, visitors to Washington, arranged to see MUM one Saturday afternoon. At the time I expected them I received a phone call from the taxi driver carrying them. "We drove to the address you gave, but there's no museum, just a house." I assured them them they were at the right place, since MUM is in my house. And that was the last I ever heard from them. After the museum visitors left, I called the concierge of the hotel where the couple was staying - she had called me to arrange the visit in the first place - and she confirmed what I had suspected: they were frightened by the thought of visiting a museum in somebody's house. Especially when the subject is menstruation.
Some have objected to this [Harry Finley as director], noting that I only have a B.A. in an unrelated field (philosophy). Directors of nonprofit organizations - and MUM is not yet a nonprofit - are often not subject-matter experts, although I do have a wide range of information about menstruation, and I have had the vision to create a small version of the future museum and this Web site, and to make myself the target on the public firing range, where I have been absorbing bullets since 1994, when I started the museum. Consider Sara Jane Bloomfield, the new (1999) director of the "perpetually packed" (Washington Post) U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her highest degree is a B.A. (in English literature). She is not a Holocaust scholar and has no academic background in Holocaust studies, although she has read widely in the field, according to a 26 February 1999 Washington Post story. And she's never published any scholarly articles. And Dr. Iris Prager, manager of North American education for Tampax tampons, e-mailed me in November 2000 when I was preparing for a television debate, writing, "You don't have to actually experience menstruation to understand how it works physiologically or to educate about it." She was president-elect of the American Association for Health Education at the time she wrote.
Directors of nonprofit organizations - and MUM is not yet a nonprofit - are often not subject-matter experts, although I do have a wide range of information about menstruation, and I have had the vision to create a small version of the future museum and this Web site, and to make myself the target on the public firing range, where I have been absorbing bullets since 1994, when I started the museum. Consider Sara Jane Bloomfield, the new (1999) director of the "perpetually packed" (Washington Post) U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her highest degree is a B.A. (in English literature). She is not a Holocaust scholar and has no academic background in Holocaust studies, although she has read widely in the field, according to a 26 February 1999 Washington Post story. And she's never published any scholarly articles. And Dr. Iris Prager, manager of North American education for Tampax tampons, e-mailed me in November 2000 when I was preparing for a television debate, writing, "You don't have to actually experience menstruation to understand how it works physiologically or to educate about it." She was president-elect of the American Association for Health Education at the time she wrote.