Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party is an installation consisting of a banquet table with places set for 39 mythical and historical women; it honors an additional 999 women by inscribing their names in gold. The work, completed in 1979, addresses the absence of women from dominant historical narratives. Chicago intended The Dinner Party to be so vast and impressive that women could never again be erased from history.

Roxane Gay is the author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, the national bestseller Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Here, she discusses Ethel Smyth, a twentieth-century composer who is represented in The Dinner Party.

This episode is part of The Dinner Party Today, a series by the Brooklyn Museum in which artists, writers, and thinkers reflect on the artwork's legacy and the women it represents.

Read more about The Dinner Party, Ethel Smyth, and the Heritage Floor, where the names of an additional 999 women are inscribed. Visit the Brooklyn Museum to see the installation in person.