Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

In the last two weeks, women have suffered a pair of tragic defeats: the Supreme Court ruled that poor women need not be given money for abortions, and the Republican party platform committee decided to end its 40-year committment to the Equal Rights Amendment. But the struggle to liberate women, and men, and to make the female presence a part of all our history will continue.

Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party," which pays tribute to all women, opened last week in Boston. The monumental work, "a symbolic history of women in Western civilization," recounts "Her-story." Where traditional history has discounted and distorted the woman's role in civilization, erasing their accomplishments. Chicago believes "in the power of art to change consciousness"--her monumental abstraction reflects both the oppression and the achievements of women.

The magnitude of the piece strikes home before the message filters through. In the middle of a dark, black-shrouded room, an enormous triangular table rests on a raised triangular platform. (The triangle, an ancient symbol of feminine power, also expresses the feminist goal of an equal society for all, men and women alike.) The three wings of the table hold place settings for 39 women, from the females of early mythology to the women who inhabit the twentieth century, from the Primordial Goddess to Georgia O'Keefe.

"I have brought these women together--invited them to a dinner, so to speak--in order that we might hear what they have to say and see the range and the beauty of our heritage, a heritage we have not yet had an opportunity to know," Chicago explains. The table rests on the "heritage floor," white-lustred porcelain embossed with the gold script names of 999 women, representatives of the thousands that history has consumed.

At first sight, the Dinner Party appears a typical banquet, each setting with porcelain flatware, a translucent chalice, and a goldedged napkin. The plates, however, jump off the stark white table cloth, vivid, enthusiastic and colorful, exuding female sexuality. Beneath each plate, an elaborately hand-embroidered runner illustrates the life of the guest at that place. Continuing the symbolism of the plate, the runners illustrate in the art-forms of the day the lives of the women.

Chicago hoped the arrangement would work on many levels--as art, as a celebration of women's traditional handicrafts--needlework, weaving and china painting--and as a political and social message about women.

The idea originated as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from a feminine perspective, with women as guests, not cooks, participants, not waiters. Where 13 men sat down for the Last Supper, 13 women formed, in legend, a witches coven--a symbol of female power, albeit evil power. But as Chicago's vision expanded, so did the size of her party. Before she was done inviting women from all of history, it had grown to a three-sided affair with 39 guests.

The first table in this historical sequence begins with the mythical goddesses and continues through the decline of the goddess-worshipping societies, the rise of the patriarchal nations, and hence the beginning of women's oppression, ending with the classical period. The second illustrates the rise of Christianity--and the fall of women's opportunities--ending with the Reformation. The final side--where the plates rise from low to high relief, symbolic of the growing impatience, the burgeoning desire to shake off the shackles--begins with the American Revolution and ends with O'Keefe, the only guest at the table who is still alive.

The imagery, painted and carved on the plates is explicitly sexual. Chicago creates a butterfly-vaginal form on each woman's plate, expressing the creation and birth; the butterfly's metamorphosis suggests women's development through the centuries. Many of the women portrayed are mythical, from societies that revered women not as sexual objects but as creators. The continued vaginal imagery perhaps suggests the rape of women, physically and psychologically, which prevented their intellectual and creative growth, condemning them to an existence tied to reproduction.

The butterfly image becomes three-dimensional in the final 13 plates as the women struggle to overcome the constraints of a male-dominated society. Virginia Woolf and O'Keefe, for example, the last two women at the table, strive to lift themselves off their plates, yet, as Chicago notes. "All women represented are still contained within their place setting." Women must continue to struggle, she believes, to create, someday, an equalized world, in which women's achievements as well as men's will "shape the world's destiny."

Chicago, a radical feminist from the city that bears her name, began work on the project in 1973--six years later, with the help of over 400 women and men who volunteered their time, it was done.

Johana Demetrakas spent four years filming the making of the "Dinner Party," and her 90-minute movie, "Right Out of History" shows in conjunction with the exhibit. "The film is like a time-warp," Demetrakas said. "It captures people in the twentieth century as they are unearthing history that goes back 4,000 years, bringing back women of the past through women and men who are making the piece."

"The Dinner Party," often called "the first feminist epic artwork," creates the controversy that accompanies any political art. Robert Taylor of The Boston Globe admits to the cultural relevance of the piece, but adds that "as a work of art, however, it is valueless." He is wrong.

The women chosen for the table each made some kind of contribution to society; each, too, attempted to improve the conditions of women during their lives. And each struggled with her own creativity in a hostile world. Many are unknown--Petronilla de Meath, for example, burned as a witch in Ireland in the fourteenth century. She symbolizes the persecution of women in medieval times, a persecution more gory but no more tragic than that which exists till this day.