This was written as part of a much larger project in 2016. Lately, I've been asked to explain what Womanism is and what it means to me. I am hoping to one day expound on my beliefs.

"Feminism was Never Quite Enough"

Black women have never had the luxury of being feminist. From the moment the first African woman was placed on the ship bound for the Americas, we weren’t able to be ladies of leisure. We tended fields, nursed babies who were not our own, and had our womanhood stolen from us. Feminism never really served us. Actually, early feminism never served any woman who wasn’t white and middle-class. While Betty Friedan was encouraging housewives to leave the kitchen and enter the workforce, the majority of women, namely Black women, were already there. In Friedan’s feminism, we were an afterthought--we filled a quota. Even our men were sometimes preoccupied with being sure they weren’t being treated as less than that they pushed the needs of Black women to the proverbial back burner. We needed our own movement. We needed our own voices. Enter womanism. Alice Walker first coined the term in the 1970's to respond to the void between the civil and women's rights movements. As Black women, we've always fallen in the middle as we do not share the privileges of the other two disenfranchised groups: white women and Black men.

On my journey to understand this term, the first book I read was “Ain’t I Womanist, Too?”, a volume of work written by womanist scholars, and edited by Monica A. Coleman. As I read Coleman’s introduction, my introduction to womanism, I just knew I identified as a Black feminist. I didn’t see anything wrong with prioritizing the needs of the Black woman over the needs of the Black man. Many times, Black women feel obligated to protect the souls of Black men, but Black men don’t always feel the obligation to return the favor. In fact, when Black women would attempt to involve themselves in the feminist struggle, the Black man would often accuse the woman of “selling out” and tearing apart the Black family. That, to me, seemed indefensible. Then I kept reading. I read until I understood that womanists are against oppression of all forms. Not excusing their actions but womanists understand that the men who behave that way are also oppressed and are attempting to operate from the little privilege that their gender allows. Womanists understand that men require deliverance from their oppression as much as women.

So no, feminism could never be enough, because feminism only scratches the surface of the Black woman’s existence. I guess that’s what Alice Walker meant in her definition when she compared womanism to purple and feminism to lavender. Womanism is deeper. Womanism is richer. Womanism is more complex.

Sources:

Hudson-Weems, Clenora. “Cultural and Agenda Conflicts in Academia: Critical Issues for Africana Women’s Studies (1989).” In The Womanist Reader, edited by Layli Phillips, 3-11. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Coleman, Monica A., Ain’t I Womanist Too? Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought, edited by Monica A. Coleman. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.

Walker, Alice, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), xi-xii.