The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007

TWO: Making Feminist Art: Womanhouse and the Feminist Art Movement, 1972–1974

48 CHAPTER TWO Making Feminist Art Womanhouse and the Feminist Art Movement, 1972–1974 the house on 533 north mariposa in Hollywood, California , opened on January 23, 1972. The weeks leading up to the opening of Womanhouse were intense as the twenty-three students enrolled in the Feminist Art Program (fap) at CalArts worked countless hours on the rooms each had designed, either alone or in collaboration. The seventeen rooms had been plastered, sanded, painted, and illuminated. Windows and doors had been repaired, toilets cleared, gardens emptied of trash, steps rebuilt. Now, for one month, the public could walk through their feminist art environment and see for themselves what the group had accomplished. The months of struggle leading up to the opening of Womanhouse had been painful and productive. Pushed beyond their own sense of what they were capable of by their instructors, students nevertheless did not let fatigue and resentment stop them from accomplishing a major artistic feat. Womanhouse was an early example of site-specific art, a work attached to a physical place or space.1 What made this piece particularly innovative was the harnessing of art to radical feminist critiques of women’s socialization. The opening of Womanhouse, and the year and a half of feminist art education that proceeded it, symbolized the growing force of a new feminist art movement. The timing was pitch-perfect. Out of the stew of art and activism, a new tactic for challenging the art world emerged in West Coast feminist networks and spread outward: that of establishing a woman-centered or “gynocentric ” aesthetics, suggesting a distinctive female creative identity. The additional focus on “women’s art,” not only art made by women, encouraged Chicago’s students to express themselves in ways they hadn’t before and, importantly, encouraged audiences, art historians, and critics to turn making feminist art 49 their attention to what had all the markings of an important new trend.2 All of these factors—art made by women, “gynocentric art,” and interest from the art press—converged as Womanhouse opened. Feminism in the Key of Domesticity Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. As the students readied Womanhouse, they joined an ongoing feminist critique of domesticity and the roles of wife and daughter unfolding in glossy magazines, popular books, and scholarly articles. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, had examined in detail the ideology of Cold War–era gender roles and their implications for women. For her, the home represented a dressed-up internment camp, a us version of the Nazi imperative “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.” Judy Syfers declared that she too wanted a wife to cook and clean up for her so she would not have to be burdened by the endless and thankless tasks of wifehood. Pat Mainardi framed housework as “political” in an essay published in the widely circulated 1970 anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful.3 fap students too had read a range of writing on women’s social role, from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, to more radical writing by Valerie Solanas, Ti-Grace Atkinson , and Shulamith Firestone. The message of much of the early feminist writing, coming on the heels of the national Cold War–era celebration of motherhood, stressed it as confining. Not all feminists in the early 1970s rejected motherhood, but many felt the near-mandatory requirement that all “healthy and mature” women mother had to be challenged for women to create opportunities for themselves beyond marriage and the family.4 fap students’ choice to make art out of the home, or the home into art, reflected the importance of overturning domesticity in mid-twentiethcentury radical feminist theory by white women. Women’s reproductive capacities had been so chronically conflated with housework that the issue of domesticity had become, by 1971, a central staging ground for feminist attempts to distinguish cultural meaning of femininity from biology. At the same time, not all feminists viewed the home as a site of oppression. For many wage-earning women and women of color, the home functioned in more complex ways as a site of resistance to oppression as well as a place that problematically nurtured gender roles.5 Neither did all feminists view motherhood as oppressive. Given the youthfulness of the fap group, they 50 chapter two had yet to have or to mother children.6 In 1971 they stood at the cusp of becoming wives or mothers (as well as wage...