From the Inventor of Mass-Market Paper Bags to a Scientist Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Polio, Meet Five American Women Whose Remarkable Achievements Have Long Been Overlooked

Most Americans learn as schoolchildren that Jonas Salk was the genius behind the invention of the polio vaccine. But there would not have been a Salk vaccine without the work of Isabel Morgan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who discovered three subtypes of the virus and helped develop an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against polio.

Those discoveries—and her determination that multiple boosters were needed for full immunity—were crucial to facilitating Salk’s development of the inactivated virus vaccine that still is in use today, some 70 years later.

But Morgan stepped back from science in 1949 to start a family, and her inactivated virus was never tested in humans. Although she later returned to scientific research, she never delved into vaccine studies again, and many of her contributions to the fight against polio faded into obscurity.

Now, however, Morgan is one of five women highlighted in “Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women’s History Into Focus,” the inaugural exhibition of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The exhibition is online-only, as the museum, approved by Congress in 2020, is still seeking a brick-and-mortar location on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The visibility theme is central to the museum’s mission, says Elizabeth Harmon, a digital curator for the museum. “We know women have been making history for centuries,” says Harmon. The challenge for scholars is to document that history, because it is less visible—because women were not part of historical narratives, or they were in unpaid positions that weren’t documented, or they weren’t given credit for their work, she says. Their stories “have seemingly been written in disappearing ink,” Harmon says.

A ten-minute digital experience, the exhibition casts a spotlight on these select women, who illustrate the notion that even though many have been obscured or erased, it is possible to reconstruct their contributions and bring them back to life.

The women chosen for the exhibition represent “a variety of time periods, backgrounds and fields, to really show that this is a systemic issue in women’s history,” says Harmon, adding that their stories are illuminated by artifacts drawn from various Smithsonian Institution museums.

Actress Rosario Dawson, who is on the museum’s advisory council, narrates an introduction, while curators from across the Smithsonian Institution speak to each of the five historical figures.

Viewers will learn about Margaret Knight, who invented a machine that automatically cut, folded and glued flat-bottomed paper bags; Hazel Fellows, a seamstress who helped sew spacesuits for the Apollo program; Hisako Hibi, a Japanese American artist who lost much of her work while in a government internment camp during World War II; and Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who became a much-lauded seamstress in Washington, D.C. in the late 19th century.

Knight is “a part of a whole lineage of women who were innovators, creatives, individuals who may not have had the traditional training in the academy, or even the proper training in school, but were able to do some really fantastic things with their lives,” says Ashleigh D. Coren, an educator with the American Women’s History Museum, in the exhibition.

Her story “is really important because it helps us understand the nuances of the American dream,” adds Coren in the narration.

As a worker in a bag factory, Knight decided that there must be a more efficient way to make the bags than the long manual process. After much thought and tinkering, she came up with the automated machine. A male co-worker tried to steal the design, but Knight sued and ultimately prevailed in court. She went on to found her own paper bag company; she had patents for some 26 inventions when she died in 1914. The 1879 patent model for the bag machine is displayed in the section on Knight.

Fellows, an African American woman, worked for the International Latex Corporation in Frederica, Delaware. She had a hand in creating the Apollo A7L spacesuit—the same suit worn by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 when he was the first man to set foot on the moon.

The exhibition features a photo of Fellows at work on the suit, but aside from that image, “we actually don’t know a ton about her,” says Emily Margolis, curator of contemporary spaceflight at the National Air and Space Museum, in the narration. Fellows and her co-workers engaged in some high-tech sewing, done in consultation with NASA engineers, says Margolis.

Keckley’s mother and other women around her taught her to sew, says Dorothy Berry, a digital curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in the exhibition. Keckley “supported both her enslavers, with her sewing skills, and eventually her own family when she was freed,” Berry adds. In 1868, she created a furor with the publication of her memoir, Behind the Scenes or, 30 Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. She had enjoyed success as a dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln and for society women in Washington, where she had her own dressmaking shop, but her book was not well received, as it betrayed confidences between her and those women.

The frontispiece from the autobiography and a few dresses are shown in the exhibition. The seamstress eventually left the hothouse environment of Washington to run the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts for Ohio’s Wilberforce University, the first college in the U.S. owned and operated by African Americans. Keckley died in 1907, having returned to Washington after a stroke.

Hibi almost became invisible, thanks to the American government’s mass roundup and incarceration of Japanese immigrants starting in February 1942. Those subject to the order were allowed to bring only a small number of personal belongings with them to the camps. Hibi and her husband, painter Matsusaburo George Hibi, left much of their work in the care of friends in San Francisco.

The Hibi family was incarcerated for more than three years, mostly at the Topaz Relocation Camp in Utah. When Hisako Hibi was eventually able to get back to San Francisco in 1954, she and her husband’s prewar art could not be found.

“I’ve been struck over and over again by how vulnerable this history is,” says Melissa Ho, curator of 20th-century art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), in the exhibition. “You see how, how fragile it is. It’s really very easy for somebody’s life’s work to sort of escape.”

She painted while in the camp and continued after her release. SAAM acquired some of her and her husband’s work in 2023. A few of Hisako Hibi’s paintings are featured in the digital exhibition.

Hibi’s family, her Japanese American community and her fellowship of Bay Area artists helped preserve her legacy and make it possible for others to know her story, says Harmon.

“I think there’s a really hopeful message here,” says Harmon. While the exhibition—and the museum—will be “highlighting the problem that women’s stories are missing from popular narratives of history, we know there’s a way we can tackle the problem,” she says.

“We know that we have resources to tell women’s stories,” says Harmon.

Alicia Ault | | READ MORE

Alicia Ault is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Medscape Medical News, WebMD and Wired. She splits her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, exploring the rich variety of food, music, art and culture on offer in those cities.