Creativity Quote by Judy Chicago

Chicago’s line carries the brash confidence of a maker watching scaffolding go up: language isn’t a neutral tool, it’s a construction site, and women are being drafted into the work whether or not they’ve signed up. Coming from an artist who helped define 1970s feminist art, the provocation lands with particular force. Chicago spent her career insisting that representation isn’t decoration; it’s infrastructure. If you can’t name an experience, you can’t reliably defend it, politicize it, or even recognize it as shared.

The phrase “at the beginning” does double duty. It admits belatedness - women arriving to a cultural system already shaped by male authority - but it also claims the thrill and volatility of origin stories. Beginnings are when rules are still soft, when metaphors can be invented, when aesthetics can become ethics. Chicago isn’t just talking about vocabulary. She’s pointing at the larger grammar of legitimacy: whose bodies get described as “neutral,” whose anger gets coded as “hysteria,” whose labor gets softened into “help.”

The sting is in the second half: “not all women are conscious of it.” That’s less scold than diagnosis. Power reproduces itself through the ordinary, through inherited phrases, through the quiet decision to accept existing terms rather than coin new ones. Chicago’s subtext is strategic: consciousness isn’t a vibe, it’s a prerequisite for authorship. The context is feminist art’s insistence on collective meaning-making - from consciousness-raising circles to The Dinner Party - where “language” includes images, symbols, and the public narratives that decide what counts as history.