“The Dinner Party” was a massive work, engaging the minds, hearts, and hands of dozens of women. It marked a reclaiming not only of aspects of women's history, but also of women's traditional arts, which had been considered “crafts” by a male dominant art world.
“The Dinner Party,” as with all works of art, represents the vision of its maker—a vision specific to an individual, to a place, and to a time. That time was the beginning of the Second Wave, when the movement was dominated by the interests of white and predominantly middle-class women. That place was the US, a country still struggling to catch up to the upheavals caused by the social revolutions of the 1960's. And that woman was Judy Chicago, a white woman eagerly embracing the discoveries, values, and comeraderie of that early Second Wave and courageously using her feminism to challenge the male hegemony of the commercial and academic art world. It was a time when sisterhood was powerful, but multi-culturalism was not.
“The Dinner Party” is an accurate reflection of the racial imbalance that characterized women's studies two decades ago, and critiques of the work that charge it with racism are valid. In a photograph commemorating the dozens of artists who contributed their work to the project, there is not one face that appears to be African American. Ironically, the book in which this photograph is published is titled The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage.
The only African American woman invited to sit at the table is Sojourner Truth. Not just a token at “The Dinner Party,” Truth was also used as a token by the predominantly-white Suffrage Movement. The cause for which she labored stood to benefit white women more immediately than women of color, and perhaps it is for this reason that she was the first woman of color to come to mind when Chicago was drawing up her seating arrangements. Perhaps the work of women like Fannie Lou Hamer or Harriet Tubman was seen as too specific to African Americans to warrant the one place at the table with so many white women.
Chicago does include the names of other Black women among the 999 names on the floor tiles, but this roster is still dominated by white women of European background.
The only First Nations woman at the table is Sacajawea, again a collaborator with white—and, this time, colonial—interests. Although the goddesses represented at the table are multi-cultural, the actual historical guests do not include any Latinas or Asian women.
Where do we go from here? Should we abandon “The Dinner Party” to the warehouse where it has been ignominiously stowed all these years—a response not to its lack of racial inclusiveness, but to its aggressive feminist content. Do we, for the good of some supposedly overriding cause, gloss the racism inherent in the token presence of women of color at the table?
To answer this question, it might be instructive to turn to the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose work as an English professor at an Ivy League university has compelled her to grapple with a canon of “great works” by almost exclusively white authors. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, she shares with us her discoveries about what she calls “African Americanism,” or “the ways in which a nonwhite or Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US:”
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury… For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasions for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.
What does this mean for 1990's feminists approaching “The Dinner Table” today? It means that we should not flinch from confronting the treatment of women of color in the work. Far from shying away from these embarrassing seating arrangements, we should make them the centerpieces of our critical understanding of the work and of the movement it represented. The absence of women of color at the table is more than an unintentional oversight. It is a necessity for a feminist identity that informed and defined the entire guest list. Sojourner Truth's position at that table, according to Morrison's theory, provides the key to understanding the myths, the terrors, the denials, the strengths, the failures of that early feminist movement. The artist's unwillingness to grant, or inability to conceive, a symbolic vulva for a Black woman may be central to an entire definition of Western sexuality, of white women's sexual identity. Adopting Morrison's perspective and approach, one could argue that the Black and the First Nation's women's place at the table, and the exclusion of the Latina and Asian woman, could be the most historically significant aspects of “The Dinner Party.”
White radical feminists have vacillated between stonewalling and scapegoating when confronted with racist artifacts of the early Second Wave. Neither is a constructive strategy, and I suggest that we take Morrison's teaching to heart and begin to find ways to talk about our history that neither glosses over or trashes this very mixed heritage. A step in this direction would be to incorporate an acknowledgment and historical contextualizing of the racist treatment of women of color in any description of “The Dinner Party,” and especially in any press release designed to raise money for housing the project. As Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist."