Judy Chicago, herself, talking about the creation of her amaaaaaaaaazing work, “The Dinner Party (1979)” in The Guardian.
The LA art scene was extremely macho in the 60s and few women were taken seriously. For a decade I struggled to make a place for myself, but to accomplish this I had to adopt “male drag” – that is, make work that looked like that of my male peers and echoed their concerns. By the end of that time I was fed up and wanted to be myself as a woman. I decided to look into history to see if there had been any before me who had encountered similar obstacles.
This was before there were any women’s studies classes, so I had to ferret out information entirely on my own. What I discovered changed my life. It also enraged me because my professor was completely wrong. Unfortunately, ignorant convictions like his continue to hold sway, exemplified by Caitlin Moran’s recent book, How To Be a Woman. “Even the most ardent feminist historian … can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years,” she writes. The truth is that for centuries women have struggled to be heard, writing books, making art and music and challenging the many restrictions on women’s lives. But their achievements have been repeatedly written out of history.
I set out to chronicle this ongoing erasure in my installation The Dinner Party, a monumental, symbolic history of women in western civilisation. It created a major stir when it premiered in 1979. Originally slated to travel to a number of museums, the tour collapsed in the face of vitriolic reviews, sometimes (sadly) written by women.
blue milk 
And then the comments over at the Guardian article are all full of people saying, “You’re just whining without presenting any evidence to support your ideas. How about some examples of these allegedly high-achieving women you claim were covered up by history” just as though there were no Women’s History section in the library.
I love, LOVE Judy Chicago. Last year me and my mum went to see The Dinner Party in an almost-deserted Brooklyn Museum and it was just fabulous – I’d only seen it in pictures before. What a woman.
Re. the comments, I have a secret theory that CiF comments are actually generated by a particularly pompous bot which runs off a run-down generator in a dusty basement somewhere in the home counties. It’s probably purple-coloured and emits shrieks of steam every now and then. I like to believe this because it’s difficult to contemplate that most of those comments are written by actual human beings.