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109 CHAPTER FOUR Joining Forces Making Art and History at The Dinner Party, 1975–1979 between 1976 and 1979, Chicago headed a significant cultural feminist art studio in Santa Monica, California. She had succeeded in drawing people to help her complete a monument to women’s history, The Dinner Party. As the studio expanded, Chicago grew more comfortable with the process of cooperation that enabled the work-intensive project to proceed. The sheer amount of art being made each day made it nearly impossible for all decisions to run through Chicago. Workers consulted with each other over how to address the range of problems or issues that came up. At the same time, even as volunteers took responsibility for their work and tackled many questions on their own, the structure of the studio was unquestioningly hierarchical: Chicago was never far away or far removed from the daily flow of decisions in the studio. She had the power to decide if a volunteer’s work on a runner had to be altered or if the glaze on a plate hit the right color. She did so in dialogue with others in the studio, but it was very clear that all final decisions rested with Chicago. This dynamic—of empowerment within hierarchy, where individuals claimed authority and responsibility through their clearly demarcated roles in a tiered system— characterized the way Chicago practiced feminism in The Dinner Party studio. Volunteers could learn from her and participate in an ongoing fine art project. They could give their time and effort and take all they could get from the experience. Responsibility for the piece, however, its symbolism and metanarrative of Western women’s history, its potential to make or break her career, remained Chicago’s. That said, the meanings of the feminism practiced in the studio extended beyond Chicago and cannot be measured simply by The Dinner Party’s effect on Chicago’s career or even its role in the larger feminist art movement 110 chapter four in the 1970s. Given its unique production conditions, understanding the feminist meaning of The Dinner Party must include an examination of the feminist ideology that infused each design decision and Chicago’s translation of a “new” history of women into art. Like other cultural feminists in the 1970s, Chicago’s feminism was bound by limits in both imagination and resources. Multicultural accounts of women had yet to be written; accounts of poor, laboring, or enslaved women were only just beginning to be published by new feminist historians . Culling a history of women from traditional sources, Chicago’s team of researchers inadvertently reproduced many of the biases that later generations of historians have corrected. Even within the limits of their day, the researchers were informed by the first stirrings of what would become cornerstones of the vibrant fields of women’s studies and women’s history. They read, discussed, and absorbed bold new theories about the role of patriarchy in capitalism, the suppression of women’s education and spiritual authority, and the prevalence of rape in history.1 Chicago and her team were not driven by the desire to offer global, transnational, or non-European histories of women as they might have been if they had been working ten years later. Rather, contemporary us gender politics and the themes held most dear to (white) us feminists in the early 1970s shaped the overarching vision of history Chicago told through The Dinner Party. Like other us feminists of her generation, Chicago witnessed a host of related contradictions in women’s status in the United States. Women attended college but were unwelcomed in the professions; women worked for pay but in positions that offered little chance for advancement or potential for leadership; the term glass ceiling would not appear until 1984. Women enjoyed the right to vote, but few held positions in political parties, the judiciary , or in local, state, or national halls of power. Women of this generation came of age participating in the struggles to challenge us racism and watched the enshrinement of color-blindness as a form of antiracism go hand in hand with ongoing discrimination. Black women continued to earn less in any job classification than did other workers. us women watched the Cold War–era commitment to female domesticity transform to a widespread celebration of female sexual availability, the freedom to divorce coupled with rising rates of female poverty, the programs to end poverty again targeting black mothers for special scrutiny. These nesting contradictions shaped the...

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