Judy Chicago and the Practice of 1970s Feminism

Abstract

JudyChicago and the Practice of 1970s Feminism Jane Gerhard Eve Ensler's 1998 play The Vagina Monologues opens with a deceptively simple statement about her longing for a woman-centered community: "I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas."1 Surely the most successful of feminist themed cultural products in recent memory, The Vagina Monologues has become a popular feminist ritual where women with little else in common beyond their vaginas come together and affirm their differences. The play and the nonprofit V-Day organization founded to channel audiences' enthusi astic support of it represent the power of a popular form of US feminism or a form of feminism that has found a niche in the cultural marketplace since the 1970s. Other examples of commercially popular feminist-themed cultural products abound: Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Contem plated Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), and the one-woman stage show by Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986); Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple (1982), made into a film in 1985, along with 9 to 5 (1980), Tootsie (1982), and Thelma and Louise (1991), as well as the chic literature-to-film/cable hybrids, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones'Diary (1996, 2001) and Candice Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997, HBO 1998—2004, 2008). This popularized form of feminism has a history worth exploring, one Feminist Studies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). 591© 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 592 Jane Gerhard that sheds light on contemporary debates over the proper modifier—post, Third Wave, or simply "new"—for today's feminism.2 To start assembling that history, it is necessary to challenge Ensler's view that her longing for "a community, a culture of vaginas" is without histor ical precedent. In fact, the play's special V-Day 2001 foreword by Gloria Steinem notes that she herself had a vagina awakening when "walking through Judy Chicago's Woman House [sic] in Los Angeles, where each room was created by a different woman artist, and where I discovered female symbol ism in my own culture for the first time."3 Like Ensler's play in the 1990s, Chicago's work in the 1970s introduced thousands of nonactivist women to elements of feminism. And again anticipating Enlser, Chicago created literal and metaphorical communities around women's commonalities through which people had an experience of feminism. In her classroom in 1970 to 1972, which resulted in the installation Womanhouse (1972), and in her studio between 1976 and 1979, which resulted in the monumental artwork The Dinner Party (1979), Chicago practiced feminist ideals of egalitarianism and personal empowerment. These literal communities generated tempo rary and discursive communities through a feminist art that articulated a belief in the commonality of all women. The feminist meanings of Woman house and The Dinner Party, clearly on display for audiences to see, were born as much from the practice of feminism in these literal communities as from the representation of women's power in the art. Examining Chicago's classroom and studio illuminates the evolution of 1970s feminism as it moved from a period of intense, multifaceted, and often confrontational activism toward a more mainstream, diffuse, and individualist expression of women's rights as the century ended. This shift away from activism, which took place in tandem with a growing conserv ative backlash in the 1980s and 1990s, set the stage for the popularity of cultural products such as The Vagina Monologues. A lens focused on the force of popular feminism allows us to explore the diversity of feminist expres sion as it reached ordinary women for whom it was often consumed as a cultural product rather than defended as an identity. The contours of that transformation, not simply a shift from politics to culture but to the poli tics of cultural production and consumption, can be seen in the commu nity spaces and art produced by Chicago. Jane Gerhard 593 Toward a "Female Art History" Chicago's fascination with women's history is one of the defining aspects of her feminism and...