Barbara Williams

I recently revisited Judy Chicago's art while researching background for a project in women and gender studies. The "Birth Project" is at least 40 years old, but it provides a contemporary context for understanding women's stories, especially as waves of misogyny flood the US Supreme Court, statehouses, even schools and libraries. Judy Chicago's art gives a female-centered context and a new voice to those uniquely female powers of pregnancy and birth, which are once again threatened by the restrictive and downright cruel powers of anti-choice and pro-life movements and laws. Too often these powers are led by those who can be neither pregnant nor give birth, but instead wage a cultural war to again relegate women to the darkness and even to erase altogether women's spaces in a Democracy. Like her other well-known work, "The Dinner Party", Judy Chicago's work prompts us to re-examine and to project women's roles into contemporary spaces...while there is still time.