March is the third month in a year under Gregorian calendar. When asked about what happens in the month of March, college basketball fans will spring and answer March Madness, which is the Men’s and Women’s Division I Basketball Championship; Christians will reply Easter, Jews will state Purim, and zoologists will say the mating season of the European hare, and students everywhere will proclaim Spring Break. Perhaps only historians, feminists, and history fanatics will respond Women’s History Month. In this March, I had the honor to attend couple of the events held in the public history institutions in Philadelphia, one at National Liberty Museum, and one at the National Constitution Center.

The event at National Liberty Museum was a crowd-sourced portrait exhibit highlighting female role models. This exhibit was on a panel of wall near the entrance, extremely easy to walk by and overlook, and the display itself was rather simplistic. It consisted of couple strings of paper, with the portraits and narratives taped on it. In my opinion, I felt this does not do the event justice. As far as I was aware, there was an empty space that the Museum used as a classroom. Instead of taped the portraits and narratives on a string of paper, they can perhaps utilized the space. However, I understood it was easier said than done. As I observe, the Museum did not have a large number of staff, perhaps which was the reason behind the simplistic execution.

Another event I attended was the Women’s History Self-Guided Tour at National Constitution Center. This event, however, for reason unknown, infuriated me. As the event itself, I found it quite simple. It was simply a preexisted exhibit with Women’s History Month stickers in the showroom. Quite honestly, this surprised me. I was expecting a separate space for those artifacts to be on display. At the same time, with a similar situation to the National Liberty Museum, from my observation, they also did not have a large number of staff. On top of that, they also needed to protect the artifacts from the elements of nature like lights and moist, also from the wondering hands of children and adults.

After my visits to both location, I found both events underwhelming. Aside from the lack of recognition, both events did not seem to have a lot of thoughts put into it. The crowd-sourced portrait exhibit completely relied on the crowd, but as I have mentioned previously, the display was not something of an attention grabber. Its quality was more along the line of something being put together in a rush to reach a deadline. Similarly, when I visited the National Constitution Center, similar emotions occurred to me. As I walked through the preexisted exhibit and tried to locate the artifacts, my reaction after found all of the artifacts was not satisfied, but more to such a degree of surprised with the limited amount of items to show a handful of women fought their way in a patriarch society to leave their legacy. To be honest, I did not expect anything bourgeois from both location, but I believed in the least, these women deserved a display on its own that was not easily overlooked, to signify their importance in our history, and the progress these women led in their era.

Overall, my visits to these events were not entirely fruitful. However, they showed me the general public does not really give much thought into Women’s History Month, to a point where a display consists of string of paper and crowd-sourced materials, and some stickers that highlighted couple of artifacts in a preexisted exhibition can passed as a feature event.