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76 CHAPTER THREE The Studio as a Feminist Space Practicing Feminism at The Dinner Party, 1975–1979 in 1974, chicago began what turned into a five-year project on a monumental work, The Dinner Party. For over a year, the artist had been working on historical themes in her art. As her thinking about women’s history and about women’s exclusion from the grand sweep of art history evolved, Chicago settled on the idea of a dinner party seating thirty-nine women with three table wings representing time periods, each seating thirteen guests. Under the table, a porcelain floor with the names of 999 women would show a long history of achievement—traditions of accomplishment building over generations. Eventually her vision included opening banners, religious staging, and historical documentation. As she imagined The Dinner Party in 1974, she took inspiration from the writing and erasures of European history and she expressed her feminism by inserting women into the understanding of that history. At the same time, Chicago continued to practice feminism as she had at fsc, CalArts, and the Feminist Studio Workshop. By 1979, The Dinner Party project had become one of the largest cultural feminist art groups of the decade, involving four hundred people over a four-year period. Chicago infused her practice of feminism with a sense of history and historical mission. No stranger to historical research, Chicago had been involved in researching prominent women since 1970, when she and her students in Fresno logged in hours researching women artists and Chicago and Schapiro presented their new feminist art history to groups across the country. When she lectured or wrote about her new project, Chicago offered the image of a lone female researcher piecing together a fragmented record of women in the dark and inhospitable male-centric library of Western history. Her sense of being alone in the process of “doing” women’s his- the studio as a feminist space 77 tory, while salient as mythmaking, was not an accurate portrait of either the state of women’s history as a discipline or her own efforts to locate expert advice for her new project. The history generated by Chicago and her students and later, by The Dinner Party project workers, moved in tandem with a growing interest in women’s history within the women’s liberation movement more broadly. As with other social protest movements of the 1960s, feminists saw politics and history as deeply related endeavors and routinely blurred the distinction between activist and academic. In 1974, Chicago found experts in the new field of women’s history to augment her research, soliciting syllabi from Joan Kelly-Gadol at Sarah Lawrence College and Vern Bullough of California State University, Northridge.1 That Chicago was not alone in her passion for a new history of women does not detract from her innovative use of that history. Her contribution in The Dinner Party would be a visual representation of women’s history circa 1975 that symbolized and contextualized the female body, stressing both its essentialism and its changing social meaning. Chicago represented a version of women’s history that reflected the feminist moment she occupied , representing gender as a heritage, a social role, a set of images, a psychological way of being, and as unmarked by race, nation, or religion. The Dinner Party reflected Chicago’s version of radical feminism’s view of women’s history, with all its brilliance and with all its flaws. At the same time, Chicago invoked history in a different sense. She viewed herself and her studio as historical, as having significance to the history of women, to Western art, and to the feminist revolution. In letters to other feminists, in her personal journal, in her memoir and in other accounts of The Dinner Party, Chicago stressed that her new piece would reveal both the record of women’s accomplishment and its historical suppression. The efforts at the studio to make The Dinner Party mattered, according to the artist, because those efforts would produce a work of art that would be the ultimate form of consciousness-raising—raise women’s feminist consciousness by helping them understand their lost history. As Chicago left the Feminist Studio Workshop and began her new project, feminism itself was changing. For women like Chicago, who had been engaged with exploring the psychological consequences of women’s secondary status for five or more years, as she had in Fresno, CalArts, and the la feminist art scene, feminism as a...

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