Time & Perspective Quote by Judy Chicago

Chicago’s line does two provocative things at once: it claims the scale of myth and it refuses the old gatekeepers’ definition of what counts as “universal.” When she invokes “deepest and most mythic concerns,” she’s not reaching for vague grandeur; she’s staking a claim on the very terrain Western art history has traditionally reserved for men - epics, origins, gods, the big symbolic machinery. The subtext is a rebuke: if women’s lives have been treated as niche, decorative, or merely personal, that’s not a natural truth, it’s a curatorial decision.

The pivot - “at this moment of history” - matters. Chicago is speaking from a period when feminism is both a mass political movement and a cultural battle over representation: who gets to be the subject, whose bodies can be monumental, whose labor becomes visible. She frames feminism as time-sensitive not because human dignity expires, but because emergencies clarify values. Rights under pressure force you to name your philosophy.

“Feminism is humanism” is a rhetorical judo move. It anticipates the dismissive “special interest” critique and flips it: feminism isn’t a subset of human concerns; it’s a diagnostic of whether your humanism is real or just a polite mask for inherited hierarchy. In Chicago’s practice - think of The Dinner Party and its insistence on craft, collaboration, and women’s historical absence - the intent isn’t only to add women into the canon. It’s to rewrite what the canon’s “myths” have been doing all along: legitimizing power by pretending it’s timeless.