The National Museum of Women in the Arts sits in Washington, D.C., built around a collection its founders assembled specifically because women painters and sculptors kept vanishing from mainstream museum walls and textbooks. This episode of the Great Museums series walks through the galleries chronologically, from 16th-century Dutch and Flemish still lifes by women trained in guild workshops through to 20th-century abstract expressionism, using the art itself to trace how female painters worked around, or sometimes because of, being locked out of academies and patronage networks. The film pauses on the French Revolution as a hinge point, when shifting ideas about citizenship and gender briefly opened new ground for women artists, and on the late 19th century, when a cluster of painters produced work still cited as the movement's high point before slipping out of the historical record for decades. Curators and gallery footage carry the argument that a museum devoted to one demographic exists to correct an omission, not to segregate one.