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

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