Her Table Is Ready

This set off a big fight with my mom. Afterward, she took me aside and tried to explain "women's lib" in terms I could understand.

Despite -- or maybe because of -- the rocky start, I have always considered myself a feminist. I even use the "f-word," which makes me something of an anomaly among my mid-20s peers, who are more likely to say, "I'm not a feminist, but . . ."

In college, I spoke out against the objectification of women when an editor of Stuff magazine came to campus. My favorite band was the feminist punk trio Le Tigre. Sample lyrics: "We got all the power getting stabbed in the shower / And we got equal rights on ladies' night."

I worked at a nonprofit called Women in Film & Video for my first job out of college. My dad's response: "All right! Break through that glass ceiling!"

I think he was trying to be supportive.

Chicago's favorite story about her feminist background goes back to the early 1960s, when she was an undergraduate art student at UCLA. She took a class on the intellectual history of Europe, she says in her new book, "The Dinner Party."

"The professor, a respected historian, promised that at the last class he would discuss women's contributions to Western thought," she wrote. "I waited eagerly all semester and, at the final meeting, the instructor strode in and announced: 'Women's contributions to European intellectual history? They made none.' "

After graduate school, Chicago tried to create masculine art and dressed like a man to fit into the art scene in 1960s Los Angeles. She never felt comfortable. She started researching women's contributions to history, and the idea of "The Dinner Party" was born.

Chicago tried to find a permanent installation for the piece in 1979, but it became an art-world nomad. She even considered the University of the District of Columbia in 1990 until it set off a nasty fight between the students and the trustees. The issue went all the way to the House of Representatives, where Robert Dornan called it "ceramic 3-D pornography," and fellow California Republican Dana Rohrabacher called it "a spectacle of weird art, weird sexual art at that."

Now, nearly 30 years after its creation, "The Dinner Party" has found a home at the Brooklyn Museum, where it opened to the public March 23.

The installation premiered in San Francisco in 1979. Many critics hated it: In a 1980 review, Hilton Kramer, the famously conservative art critic for the New York Times, called it "very bad art," as well as crass.

Chicago said the critics slammed her for creating "nothing but vaginas on plates."