Ali Gonzalez Final Exam-Gender and the Home

Up until the mid-20th century, American women had a strong association to the home. The woman’s assumed responsibility as domestic matron, who took care of virtually every aspect of the house (illustrated below), was especially evident in the “Suburbia Age” of the 1950s. However in more recent times, women have been challenging the ‘perfect housewife’ stigma through their emerging roles as ‘modern day working women’. Contemporary women artists, particularly Judy Chicago and Lorna Simpson, are conceptualizing the idea of gender and the home through their daring use of space and vivid artwork.

Throughout her artistic career, Judy Chicago has consistently experimented with art and space according to her feminist views. She famously uses feminist iconography in her works, mostly consisting of “hollow, rounded forms and symmetrical motifs that evoked flowers, butterflies, and vulvas” (Fineman). Chicago’s most notable achievement and contribution to feminist art is her iconic installation The Dinner Party, which is currently showcased at The Brooklyn Museum. The installation represents 1,038 prominent women in history, “39 women are represented by place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests” (“Brooklyn Museum”). Her use of space is not only unified but also deliberate. For instance, the large banquet table is in the shape of an equilateral triangle, which symbolizes equality (Fineman). In the detail of The Dinner Party shown below, Chicago illustrates another prominent female artist, Georgia O’Keefe, through a dinner plate. O’Keefe painted flowers representing the relationship between women and their sexuality (Hayden). O'Keefe's painting Flowers of Fire (shown below) is an example of a flower as a vaginal symbol. Her “art was always an immediate response to her environment” (“Georgia O’Keefe”). Thus by representing important women throughout history, Chicago emphasizes the emergence of women’s independence and place beyond the home. Moreover, her clever use of domestic objects, such as dinner plates, references society’s assumption of a woman’s supposed 'duty' to her home.

Lorna Simpson is a female artist who also undermines the notion of gender roles and relates it to space. Her work Gathered, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (pictured below), brings together “unidentified photographs of African American women to create compelling narratives” (Arterberry). Similar to Chicago’s Dinner Party, the spatial closeness of the photographs shows women’s unified identity as female. Although the photographs remain close in space, they are scattered and not aligned. This could symbolize their desperate desires to break free from conformity and traditional social roles that restrict them to the home. Moreover, the anonymous women illustrated in this work contradict Chicago’s use of recognizable women. By not naming her subjects, Simpson stresses the idea that it is every woman’s struggle to overcome the social role that has been bestowed upon her by society. The video embedded below illustrates the artist’s message of exploring identity.

The transition from women in the 1950s as 'domestic matrons' to the 'modern day woman' has been fundamental for gender roles and the home. During the 1950s, society accepted females as domestic workers. Even sexual services were considered to be “all in the day’s work for the housewife” (Hayden 116). Yet after this decade, women started to move beyond the stigma of a domestic housewife confined to the space of her home. Beginning with their fight for equal rights in 1960s, women have increased their social status, “Fifty thousand woman marchers moved down Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding day care, abortion rights, equal jobs, and equal access to education” (Hayden 243). The video below further demonstrates women’s fight for equality. As Janet Abu-Lughod wrote in 1974, “The city we seek as women is a human city in which we all share in the pleasures and pains, where women will be neither dolls nor drudges, and where role specializations so idealized in the past--females nurturing and males laboring—will give way to whole and cooperating humans” (Hayden 245). The woman is now allowed more independence and for that reason there has been an increase in single hard workingwomen in America. The modern workingwoman today works a regular day job, exercises on her spare time but still uses the house as her social haven. Domestic spaces have been designed to reflect these social changes. For example, “Circulation within buildings are designed to balance sociability and privacy, exercise and ease” (Hayden 219). In addition, private apartments are more prevalent nowadays for independent, single women who do not need the entire space of a family home, “One-person units provide a bed/sitting room, half-bath, kitchenette, and dining area (floor plan is shown in image below). Independence is stressed by making it possible for residents to eat alone, yet the private dining tables are placed next to interior windows opening the corridor, to simulate a very small front porch” (Hayden 219).

The social role that women play in America is substantially different than in the past. Because of feminist movements and prominent women in history, including those represented in The Dinner Party, women have broken out of the limited position they once held in their homes. Both Judy Chicago’s work and the art of Lorna Simpson represent the important relationship between the past-perceived roles of women in society and the reality of real women today. Works Cited Anya Garrett. Georgia O’Keefe: Flowers of Fire. 2011. Photograph. Vintage Waldo Arterberry, Marissa. "Lorna Simpson's Gathered: Creating Myth and Mystery." Her Blue Print. 2011. Fineman, Mia. "Table for 39." Slate. The Slate Group, LLC, 25 Apr 2007. Web. . "Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: The Dinner Party." Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum, 2011. "Georgia O'Keefe." My Studios. N.p., 2012. Web. . Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984. 114. Lorna Simpson: Gathered. 2012. Video. Her BluePrint, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Private Apartment: Floor Plan. 2010. Photograph. Springvale Terrace, Silver Spring, MD. Women During the Civil Rights Movement. 2009. Video. YouTube. The Undomestic Goddess. 2009. Photograph. Wise Words of Love, Dating and Relationships Blog.