Feminism In Judy Chicago's Dinner Party

Judy Chicago comments in her essay that she “had been made to feel ashamed of her own aesthetic impulses as a woman, pushed to make art that looked as if it had been made by a man.” The idea that female artists were not permitted to draw from their personal experiences completely undermines the basis of what art is. Art provides context of culture: it adds meaning and relevance to the time that it was created, and the artists’ personal experiences is what drives the artwork, and society, forward. Chicago’s blatant truths about women and their art in the early 70’s describes the struggles of walking between the worlds of femininity and the regular world talked about by Woolf. It’s impossible to deny the importance of femininity. If one is not

given the freedom to embrace their experiences as a female in the world (Woolf used the money to be symbolic of freedom, talking about how if women had their own money, then they could create a room of their own) then the art world cannot move forward. Chicago and Schaprio carved out the freedom and a room of their own through the Womanhouse project: they allowed women to use their experiences as females to further explore their art form in complete safety.
It must be noted that Judy Chicago and her “Dinner Party” (1974-79) launched her into infamy as she refused to acknowledge the multitude of volunteers, both male and female, that assisted in the creation of the piece. With that single action of not acknowledging the assistants, Chicago forfeited the importance of her work that otherwise was a critical point for feminist and contemporary art. She forfeited her status as a feminist artist as she refused to put her assistants on the same plane as herself, which is counterintuitive to the basic feminist ideology. While Chicago’s feminist viewpoint lessened with “Dinner Party”, Womanhouse still stands as a beacon in the beginnings of feminist art.
Miram Schapiro, however, has managed to retain her feminist viewpoint in her artwork without damaging the reputation and the intent of feminism as Judy Chicago did with “Dinner Party”.

Schapiro’s work has evolved and adapted based upon the issues, however her core values of feminism and female representation in art history has not altered. Shapiro takes a much more subtle view of feminism in much of her early work she paints to deliberately blur the lines of the perceived genders. Schapiro used bold colors and shapes just as Woolf used veiled metaphors and symbols to convey the idea of the feminine and the need for equality. In works like “Keyhole” (1971), it is deliberately ambiguous in terms of gendered art as the colors (pinks and blues) as well as the shape itself could lend itself to the feminine or masculine, relating back to the idea that ‘locked in’ to a particular gender is a societal confine and doesn’t actually exist. Woolf recognized this as she wrote, “I thought of how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.” She is able to deftly describe the idea of men who were locked in to particular activities and ideologies and lacked freedom alongside the women that were locked into their particular social constraints. Woolf points out that most of humanity is either locked in or locked out of equality. Feminism was the solution to the issue as femininism freeing for the sexes; it allows for each sex to explore aspects of the other and, for those who so desire, to float in-between set ‘rules’. Miriam Schapiro’s artwork is the visual representation of floating between the perceived genders. She, like Chicago and the rest of the ‘educated’ female artists, were trained by men to create artwork like a man, but with Womanhouse and subsequent works, Schapiro was able to reject the notion to ‘make art like a man’ and was made artwork that was wholly her own, enabling her to have a room of her own. With her painting

“Big Ox” (1967) she touched on the idea of the male presence by saying, “The painting is a very strong image with a seemingly neutral subject—the letter O superimposed on the letter X. The O was actually a hexagon with a pink labial interior, whose geometry masked its sexual meaning. In painting this image I behaved unconsciously, like all women artists mentored by men” (Hyperallergic).
It is important to recognize that while Womanhouse was a collective of countless artists coalescing in the name of feminism, it is the success of specific pieces that contributed to the success of the overall project as Womanhouse was meant to celebrate the individual woman just as much as it was meant to represent the collective unit of females. Specific works like the “The Nurturant Kitchen” by Vicki Hodgetts, Susan Frazier, and Robin Weltsch showcased the inherent femininity that the home has and commented on how women where only seen as an extension of the home; women were only good to nourish and to give of themselves for the good of the household. The kitchen space in Womanhouse was painted completely in bright pink, including the canned goods and appliances while the insides of the drawers featured collages of exotic locales that represented the fantasy travel that might have been in the minds of women trapped at home in their kitchens. The real art of the room, however, was the sunny-side eggs fastened to the ceiling that morphed to breasts as they went down the wall and then became eggs once again as they approached the stove (Womanhouse: Cradle of Feminist Art). “The Nurturant Kitchen” is almost offensively feminine and that was the intent. The kitchen space had to be completely, over-the-top feminized in order be noticed; it forces the onlooker to pay attention to the room of the home that the woman is most sequestered to; it was a woman’s ‘room of her own’ but not by choice.
Womanhouse collectively chose to reject the perceived “reprehensible poverty of the female sex” (Woolf) and worshiped the idea of the female, creating an environment in which the viewer had no choice but to also fall to their knees and worship at the alter of womanhood and realize the importance of the feminine. Womanhouse also abided by idea of celebrating the feminine mystique but also attempting to get the point across that a female should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination (The Feminine Mystique) that carried feminism into contemporary times. It was Woolf that said, “to raise bare walls out of bare earth was the utmost one could do,” when speaking indirectly about gender roles in 1929. When Womanhouse was erected in 1972, it was the church that rested upon the bare earth of feminism that had been carefully laid by Woolf and others.
Xochi Solis serves as an contemporary example of the impact of Womanhouse and its early feminist literature inspirations as she uses subtly feminine works in her installation pieces as well as her framed works. Solis uses found magazines, which includes imagery that glorifies/sexualizes the perfect female form and purposefully places it in order to obscure its importance in the overall scheme of the piece. She also utilizes gestural mark-making that is completely her own and has Womanhouse to thank for that as without Womanhouse, it is doubtful that Solis would have the complete freedom that she does know to use whatever methodologies and materials she so desires without it being labeled as completely feminine artwork. Womanhouse and other pieces by Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago pushed the idea of feminine artwork past the line that the barrier of labeling artwork feminine simply because it was done by a female was completely shattered and we were left with only the artwork our individual minds to label it as feminine or not.
Feminism and feminist art has continued to find more steady footing on more well received grounds, and that’s partial to to do with a hunger. A hunger by modern women for the solidarity of something like Womanhouse. The deep desire for women to be unafraid to be feminine and unafraid to do things that aren’t within the confines of what females ‘usually do’.
Womanhouse offered perhaps one of the first true senses of unity and familiarity among females and female artists. There had always been female artists producing artwork, both of feminist nature and not, but Womanhouse provided the international platform for the artists to stand together and promote the idea of gender equality through art forms. It’s about finding a balance of accepting and embracing one’s femininity while not allowing one’s gender to be construed as a roadblock towards one’s goals. Through early feminist texts like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own we are able to see parallels in contemporary art revolving around the idea of feminism and the feminine identity.