Bella Abzug [N.O.W. demonstration for Iranian women's rights]
Instead of one centralized building requiring millions in funding and political consensus, the Women's Freedom Museum places commissioned exhibitions where people already are. No waiting for permission. No compromising the story to make it more comfortable.
Each exhibition honors a woman whose story changed something - science, politics, art, justice, the way we understand the world. No censoring difficult truths. No diluting history to make it less "polarizing."
I've spent my career creating public storytelling - ideas that live out in the world and bring overlooked stories into view. My work includes campaigns for The Female Quotient, Pure Leaf, Hasbro's Ms. Monopoly, and Allergan's "Eyepowerment," each exploring women's visibility and voice in culture.
At DDB Chicago I led the Field Museum account, always experiential, always designed to carry history out of the institution and into the world where more people could interact with it. I loved museums - but what I loved more was sharing history with the world.
But the awareness that led to this
museum started much earlier.
As a child I spent afternoons in orphanages in the Philippines. There were always more abandoned girls than boys. In high school I volunteered in nursing homes and met women who had lived extraordinary lives - yet their stories were quietly disappearing with them.
That stayed with me.
I started going to estate sales whenever I could. Not for furniture. For women. I collect photographs - portraits of women whose faces ended up in boxes alongside costume jewelry and old cookbooks.
Once, in Chicago, I stumbled into the home of Kate Cleary's grandson. I had no idea who she was until I discovered she was a writer, a poet, a mother of six - a pioneer woman at the turn of the century who kept creating through hardship that would have stopped most people. I collected what I could - her photos, her books, her grandchildren's collection of her poems - and brought it all home with me.
It's still here with me.
Waiting for the next chapter.
For years I thought the answer was to build a traditional museum - one place that could finally tell the whole story of women's lives. But the more women I learned about, the more impossible that idea felt. There are simply too many women to honor, and not enough space in traditional history to hold them.
Telling women's history will take a village to build. But that is how women have always made things happen - through community, through unconventional methods, through taking things into our own hands.
Karin Verlo Rose
Founder
