Real and fictional role models included.

Mrs Terminator in battle for shrine to women

A YEAR after her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, Maria Shriver has flexed her own political muscles by calling for the state’s history museum to be turned into a celebration of women ranging from union organisers to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Three members of the museum board have resigned in protest at the plan, which was revealed when Shriver spoke for 15 minutes at a board meeting on “the feminist future”.

Since it was built in Sacramento, the state capital, in the 1980s the museum has hosted traditional exhibitions devoted to early aviation, logging and native American art.

It has run into the red, however, and Shriver - who last month persuaded the board to change its name from the Golden State Museum to the California State History Museum - wants to make it more popular.

Shriver’s spokesman said she believed that a women’s museum would be more attractive than the current collection which includes pottery, firearms, tribal garments and a pair of Louis XV chairs donated by Nancy Reagan.

Her late husband Ronald Reagan was a former governor of California.

“It’s her (Shriver’s) belief that the museum would not belong to her but to the almost 17m women in the state of California,” said the spokesman.

Last May Shriver took over the museum’s first floor to help organise an exhibition called Remarkable Women, with pictures and film of 200 Californian women from Dolores Huerta, a farmworkers’ union organiser arrested 22 times during the 1960s, to Elizabeth Taylor and the teenage actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The exhibition also includes the dress worn by Shriver at her husband’s inauguration.

Athough the exhibition has been a success with school parties Shriver is said to have been frustrated that she lacked the space to include other role models nominated by young visitors, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, heroine of the eponymous television series.

“This is not the kind of museum I signed on for,” said Karen Sinsheimer, one of the three board members who resigned. She said it was pointless trying to compete with the £70m International Museum of Women, nearly five times larger, due to open in 2008 in San Francisco.

There is also concern about apparent connections with the Kennedy family, of which Shriver is a member. The Remarkable Women exhibition was put together by Edwin Schlossberg, a New York designer who is married to Shriver’s cousin Caroline Kennedy.

Shriver’s powers may be unwritten but they are strong. Steven Merksamer, another board member, said he and his colleagues were caught between the imminent financial collapse of the museum and the “extremely able, charming and talented first lady of California”. He added: “What would you do?” Shriver, 48, a former television reporter, honed her husband’s political skills before he ran for office. She is part of the campaign to change the constitution to allow those born outside America, like Schwarzenegger, to run for president.

The development of a feminist shrine could help to counterbalance questions about “Arnold the Groper” which undermined Schwarzenegger’s bid for the governorship of California and would be certain to reappear during any national campaign.

One board member said: “We have to save the museum but what has it come to (when) serious historical curators have to seek protection from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”