Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the symbolic guests.

Each place setting includes a hand-painted china plate, ceramic cutlery and chalice, and a napkin with an embroidered gold edge.

Each plate, except the ones corresponding to Sojourner Truth and Ethel Smyth, depicts a brightly colored, elaborately styled vulvar form.

The Dinner Party was created by artist Judy Chicago, with the assistance of numerous volunteers, with the goal to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.

"[2] According to the artist, “The Dinner Party suggests that women have the capacity to be prime symbol-makers, to remake the world in our own image and likeness” (SNYDER, 1981, p.

[2] Each place setting features a table runner embroidered with the woman's name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments, with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet, and a plate.

[5] [6] In 2018, Chicago created a limited edition set of functional plates based on the Dinner Party designs.

[8] It began modestly as Twenty-Five Women Who Were Eaten Alive, a way in which Chicago could use her "butterfly-vagina" imagery and interest in china painting in a high-art setting.

[8] The project was organized according to what has been called "benevolent hierarchy" and "non-hierarchical leadership", as Chicago designed most aspects of the work and had the final control over decisions made.

[8] The 39 plates start flat and begin to emerge in higher relief toward the end of the chronology, meant to represent modern woman's increasing independence and equality.

[9] The first wing of the triangular table has place settings for female figures from the goddesses of prehistory through to Hypatia at the time of the Roman Empire.

It begins with Anne Hutchinson and moves through the twentieth century to the final places paying tribute to Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe.

[10] In a 1981 interview, Chicago said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work brought on the only period of suicide risk she had ever experienced in her life, characterizing herself as "like a wounded animal".

[11] She said that she sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community and that friends and acquaintances took on administrative support roles for her, such as opening her mail, while she threw herself into working on Embroidering Our Heritage, the 1980 book documenting the project.

The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings", and defended the work as an excellent example of the feminist effort.

Hilton Kramer, for example, argued, "The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art".

[13] Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.

[14] The Dinner Party was satirized by artist Maria Manhattan, whose counter-exhibit The Box Lunch at a SoHo gallery was billed as "a major art event honoring 39 women of dubious distinction", and ran in November and December 1980.

[15][16][17][18] In response to The Dinner Party being a collaborative work, Amelia Jones makes note that "Chicago never made exorbitant claims for the 'collaborative' or nonhierarchical nature of the project.

In addition, the runners grow strong as the work progresses, while the plates become weaker, more monotonous and more overdone, which means the middle two-thirds of the piece is more successful."

[21] Regarding the place settings, Janet Koplos believes that the plates are meant to serve as canvases, and the goblets offer vertical punctuation.

By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place..."[23] Much like Spillers's critique, Alice Walker published her critical essay in Ms. magazine noting "Chicago's ignorance of women of color in history (specifically black women painters), focusing in particular on The Dinner Party's representation of black female subjectivity in Sojourner Truth's plate.

This means that several very prominent women of Western history were excluded, such as Frida Kahlo, Teresa of Ávila, Gabriela Mistral, and more.

Chicago herself responded[26] to these criticisms, claiming that all of these women are included on the "Heritage Floor" and that focusing solely on who is at the table is "to over-simplify the art and ignore the criteria my studio team and I established and the limits we were working under".

[27] Jones also addresses some critics' argument that The Dinner Party is not high art because of its huge popularity and public appeal.

Where Kramer saw the work's popularity as a sign that it was of a lesser quality, Lippard and Chicago herself thought that its capability of speaking to a larger audience should be considered a positive attribute.

Many conservatives criticized the work for reasons summed up by Congressman Robert K. Dornan in his statement that it was "ceramic 3-D pornography", but some feminists also found the imagery problematic because of its essentializing, passive nature.

I find it all about Judy Chicago's ego rather than the poor women she's supposed to be elevating – we're all reduced to vaginas, which is a bit depressing.

[29] The work was to be donated as a gift to the school, and it was to join an expanding collection of African-American art, including a large group of paintings by Washington abstractionist Sam Gilliam and works by Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence and Lois Mailou Jones, among others.

These – along with works by a group of local white Color Field painters and some white UDC faculty members also in the university collections – were to become the core of what was presented in early 1990 as a ground-breaking multicultural art center, a hopeful coalition between artists of color, feminists and other artists depicting the struggle for freedom and human equality.