The P&D movement arose in opposition to the Minimalist and Conceptualist movements, which valued austerity and demeaned ornamentation and craft. In their widely anthologized 1978 essay "Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture," P&D artists Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon explained how they thought sexist and racist assumptions underlaid Western art history discourse. They reasserted the value of ornamentation and aesthetic beauty - qualities assigned to the feminine sphere. Floral imagery, patterning, and decoration are associated with the feminine. P&D artists included elements of crafts such as needlepoint and beading, which were traditionally done by women within the domestic sphere. By including these elements in their work, they dismantle the hierarchy of fine art over craft, and thereby raise questions about public (male) verses domestic (female) spaces, and fine art versus utiltarian objects. However, critics argue about to what extent the P&D movement can be considered feminist. Although Kozloff and Jaudon were explicit about their feminist agenda, male artists Robert Kushner (artist) and Kim MacConnel sometimes avoided the label. They were more vocal about their aesthetic motivation for pursuing decoration. Writes Kushner: "For gallery and museum acceptance, if the art was industrial-looking, rectangular, and gray, black, or white, it was shown... Everything else (except color field painting, which today can be viewed as Technicolor minimalism) seemed to be marginalized. This simply did not fit many of our temperaments. Gray was boring. We wanted our art to be a lasting experience that took a great deal of time to decode fully." Since these male artists both helped to define the P&D movement and were commercially successful, there is disagreement about P&D being called a woman’s movement. On the other hand, Carissa DiGiovanni argues that male artists' distance from the feminist cause actually advanced it overall by taking feminine aesthetics and making them acceptable to the art establishment.