Womanism

views updated

Womanism

A CONCEPT GROUNDED IN BLACK WOMEN’s EXPERIENCE

One of the most destructive manifestations of racism is the erasure of the cultures and experiences of people of color and the presumption that whiteness is dominant and normative. In the United States, the experiences of black people have been the particular targets of such erasures. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, white women activists, including some who participated in the civil rights movement, sparked a feminist movement that challenged patriarchy and generated new modes of thinking about gender and women’s experience. In the words of one black feminist critique, however, “all the women are white.” Consistent with American racial hierarchies, white women’s experiences provided the foundation for feminist thought; the problem of racism was presumed to be subsumed within the problem of patriarchy.

A NEW WORD FROM ALICE WALKER

The term womanist was created in 1981 by novelist, poet, essayist, critic, and feminist Alice Walker. The term provided the foundations for a theory of black women’s history and experience that highlighted their significant roles in community and society. Heavily appropriated by black women scholars in religious studies, ethics, and theology, womanist became an important tool for approaching black women’s perspectives and experiences from a standpoint that was self-defined and that resisted the cultural erasure that was and still is such a destructive component of American racism.

Critical of the ways in which white feminists used their own experiences to interpret black women’s experiences, Walker first used the term in a review of Jean Humez’s book, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. Shakers built a religious movement that required its members to be celibate. On becoming a Shaker, Rebecca Cox Jackson left her husband and assumed a life of celibacy. Because Jackson traveled with a woman partner, similar to many black women missionaries and evangelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Humez chose to call Jackson’s lifestyle “lesbian.”

Walker objected to Humez’s imposition of a term that was not grounded in Jackson’s definition of the situation. Walker questioned “a non-black scholar’s attempt to label something lesbian that the black woman in question has not” (p. 81). Within the essay, Walker laid the foundations of her definition by rejecting a term for women’s culture based on an island (Lesbos) and insisting that black women, regardless of how they were erotically bound, would choose a term “consistent with black cultural values” that “affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world, rather than separation, regardless of who worked and slept with whom” (pp. 82–83).

A CONCEPT GROUNDED IN BLACK WOMEN’s EXPERIENCE

Humez’s choice of labels was an example of the ways white feminists perpetuated an intellectual colonialism. This intellectual colonialism reflected the differences in power and privilege that characterized the relationships between black and white women. The term womanist was Walker’s attempt to provide a word, a concept, and a way of thinking that allowed black women to name and label their own experiences. For Walker, the invention of the term was an act of empowerment and resistance, thus addressing and challenging the dehumanizing erasure that is a perpetual problem in a racist society.

In 1983, Walker provided an elaborate, dictionary-style definition of the term in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (pp. xi– xii). This book of essays, which included her review of Gifts of Power, provided a more extensive view of her understandings of the experiences and history of black women as a distinctive dimension of human experience and a powerful cultural force. Her definition can be viewed as a philosophical overview of her work in novels, short stories, essays, and poetry.

First, Walker defines a “womanist” as a “black feminist or feminist of color.” Clearly Walker includes the liberationist project of feminism in her definition. However, that liberationist project, as her definition goes on to demonstrate, should be grounded in the history and culture of the black women’s experience.

Walker gives the term an etymology rooted in the African American folk term womanish, a term African American mothers often used to criticize their daughters’ behavior. “Womanish” meant that girls were acting too old and engaging in behavior that could be sexually risky and invite attention that was harmful. Walker, however, subverts “womanish” and uses it to highlight the adult responsibilities that black girls often assumed in order to help their families and liberate their communities. Jackson lost her mother at age thirteen and helped raise her brothers and sisters along with one of her brother’s children. As a civil rights worker in Mississippi Freedom Schools, Walker taught women whose childhoods ended early, limiting their educations. Walker also observed the participation of young people in civil rights demonstrations and was aware of the massive resistance of children in such places as Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Walker describes the term “womanish” as an opposite of “girlish,” subtly hinting that the pressures of accelerated development are facts of black female life not apprehended by white women’s experiences. “Womanist” implied a desire to be “Responsible. In charge. Serious” (p. xi).

A womanist, according to Walker, loves other women and prefers women’s culture, a very antipatriarchal orientation. However, womanists evince a commitment “to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” A womanist is “not a separatist, except periodically, for health” and, as a “universalist,” she transcends sources of division, especially those dictated by color and class (p. xi). Walker subverts the antagonisms of class and color, often overemphasized by black nationalists, as differences among family members. A womanist also evinces a determination to act authoritatively on behalf of her community. Walker evokes very specific black women role models such as Mary Church Terrell, a clubwoman whose politics transcended color and class, and Harriet Tubman, famous for her exploits on the Underground Railroad and Civil War battlefields.

Finally, Walker offers a description of black women’s culture that is at odds with some major emphases in white culture. Walker’s key word is “love,” and she links it to spirituality, creative expression, and political activism. Her definition includes a love of “food and roundness” that stands in stark contrast to the body images and gender norms of the dominant culture, a culture that celebrates pathologically thin white women and socially produces eating disorders. Walker emphasizes self-love, “Loves herself, regardless,” a direct challenge to the selfhatred that is a consequence of racism (p. xi).

FROM WOMANIST TO WOMANISM

Although womanist has not displaced the terms feminist and feminism, the womanist idea resonated with many black women as a grounded and culturally specific tool to analyze black women’s experiences in community and society. Walker’s idea was particularly useful for black women in religious studies and theology, where the confrontation between black and white theologies, in the context of liberation theologies, was particularly vibrant and direct. In normative disciplines such as ethics, theology, and biblical studies, the idealism and values in Walker’s idea were especially helpful. Katie Geneva Cannon, author of Black Womanist Ethics (1988), Jacqueline Grant, author of White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989), and Renita Weems, author of Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (1988), utilized Walker’s perspective to explore the relationship of African American women’s experiences to the construction of ethics, to theological and christological ideas, and to the meaning and importance of biblical stories about women. Their work laid a foundation for an explosion of womanist analysis in religious studies and elsewhere.

Scholars using womanist analysis challenged not only black male theologians to expand their analysis of gender but also pushed white female theologians to expand their analysis of race. Walker’s idea also inspired other culturally specific forms of analysis such as “Mujerista theology” among Latina theologians. In a “roundtable” among feminist scholars in 1989, Cheryl Sanders questioned the usefulness of Walker’s idea, because she gave “scant attention to the sacred.” The points and counterpoints in that roundtable emphasized the wide-ranging invitation to analysis and criticism contained in Walker’s idea.

Although bell hooks in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) suggested that some women use the term “womanist” to avoid asserting they are “feminist,” the issue is more complex. For many black women who were self-identified as feminists, the emphases of late-twentieth-century white feminists did not match their own concerns and experiences. Feminist ethicist Barbara Andolsen offered an analysis of racism in the feminist movement. In Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks: Racism in American Feminism (1986), she pointed to areas of disagreement between black women who identified specifically as black feminists and white feminists. She identified work, rape, beauty, and gender separatism as sources of conflict between black and white feminists. Walker’s definition of womanist and her larger body of writings directly engage all of these issues.

Although Walker did not indicate a desire to create a womanist movement, the term womanism was a natural extension of womanist. Walker’s writings and ideas, however, emphasized black women’s creativity, enterprise, and community commitment, and “womanist” links these specifically to feminism. Womanism is identified as both the activism consistent with the ideals embedded in Walker’s definition and the womanist scholarly traditions that have grown up in various disciplines, especially religious studies. “Womanism is,” as Stacey Floyd Thomas (2006) points out, “revolutionary. Womanism is a paradigm shift wherein Black women no longer look to others for their liberation” (p. 1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. 1986. “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Cannon, Katie Geneva. 1988. Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

Floyd-Thomas, Stacey, ed. 2006. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society. New York: New York University Press.

Grant, Jacquelyn. 1989. White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.

Mitchem, Stephanie. 2002. Introducing Womanist Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Sanders, Cheryl. 1989. “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (2): 83–112.

Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Weems, Renita J. 1988. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego, CA: LuraMedia.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism