The "Spirit of the Centennial," as she is called, conveys a sentiment more akin to "Hello, sailor" than "Hear me roar," and fittingly so. "This isn't going to be a bunch of feminists running around," promised museum CEO Cathy Bonner two years ago, when the museum was in its early planning stages. She wasn't kidding.

The Women's Museum, which opened last month, is an institution as notable for what it omits as what it contains, a watery survey of female accomplishment that for the most part glosses over the conditions -- i.e., a couple of centuries of sexual inequality and its attendant ills -- that make such an institution necessary in the first place.

Heavy on wall text and light on historical artifacts, the exhibits perform a careful two-step around issues like abortion, sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and pornography that might be construed as unpleasant or discomfiting. While sepia-toned struggles (such as the suffrage movement) get their due, when it comes to present-day battles, the museum is a monument to the adage "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." The agenda is stubbornly, willfully, relentlessly positive -- a feel-good survey of female achievement that's as easy to swallow as a multivitamin.

It also is the manifestation of a mild-mannered brand of feminism that has long flourished in the South, often in direct and slightly miffed opposition to the movement establishment centered in the Northeast. Dedicated to making peace with a man's world, the women behind the Women's Museum don't shrink from the feminist label, but they proudly reject confrontational tactics.

"What we're saying is women can do anything, and if they're going to do it, they must do it for themselves," explains executive director Candace O'Keefe. "It is about looking at the positives rather than the negatives -- what we have done and what we can do rather than what we haven't done and what we couldn't do."

Visitors to the Women's Museum are invited to absorb the bright side of women's history through a timeline of important moments (from the matrilineal society of the Pueblo Indians in the 1500s, to the opening of the Women's Museum) and a pantheon of 38 "Unforgettable Women."

An exhibit on "Organized Movements" lumps groups like MADD, AARP and the Girl Scouts together with groups devoted to women's rights, placing reproductive freedom and Thin Mints on equal footing. Successful women in fields ranging from inventing to comedy are included, with the emphasis on breadth rather than depth. There also is a smattering of curios -- one of Amelia Earhart's flight jackets, a WNBA basketball -- among numerous bits of wall text, photos and an occasional video clip.

It would be easy to forgive the Women's Museum its limitations if it were a more traditional institution, focused on preserving the past rather than making a sociopolitical point. But the museum follows what is called in curatorial circles the "forum" model as opposed to the "temple" model. (The former type is devoted to fostering a sense of collective identity; the latter is a repository of relics and treasures, such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

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