Womanism: Celebrating Black Women’s Strength and Solidarity

When Alice Walker sat down to define what it meant to be a Black woman in America, she knew the word “feminist” wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t wrong – but it wasn’t enough. The challenges Black women face don’t fit neatly into a single category of race or gender. They sit at the intersection of both, compounded further by class. In 1983, Walker offered a new word to hold all of that complexity: womanist. Understanding womanism means understanding why Black women needed their own framework – and what that framework has made possible.

Defining womanism 🔗

Womanism is a feminist intellectual framework that centers the conditions and experiences of women of color, especially Black women. It was created not to replace feminism, but to address the blind spots it left behind. The term was coined by African American author and activist Alice Walker to recognize Black women who felt they were overlooked during the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s – a movement dominated largely by middle-class white women whose concerns, while real, were not the whole picture.

Walker first introduced the term “womanist” in her 1979 short story “Coming Apart” and developed it fully in her landmark 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. There, she defined a womanist as, at its core, a Black feminist or feminist of color. But she went much further. Walker defined womanism as embracing the courage, audacity, and self-assured demeanor of Black women, alongside their love for other women, themselves, and all of humanity. A womanist, in Walker’s framing, is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people – male and female – and is not a separatist.

Walker drew her terminology directly from Black cultural tradition. When asked about the origins of the term in a 1984 interview, Walker explained that she needed a word that was organic, that came out of the culture, that expressed the spirit she saw in Black women – and “womanish” was exactly that. In Black folk expression, mothers would tell their daughters “you acting womanish” as a warning against behavior deemed too bold, too knowing, too grown. Walker reclaimed that phrase as something empowering rather than corrective.

Key figures in womanism: Alice Walker and beyond 🔗

Alice Walker is the foundational figure in womanist thought, but the framework didn’t begin and end with her. It grew into a larger intellectual tradition shaped by multiple thinkers.

Alice Walker’s contributions 🔗

Walker’s definition of “womanish” behavior is central to understanding what womanism celebrates. She described it as referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior – wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one, interested in grown-up doings, being responsible, in charge, and serious. This is a direct inversion of societal expectations that Black girls should be passive, unquestioning, and deferential.

Walker also emphasized joy, love, and cultural rootedness as acts of resistance. A womanist, in her definition, loves music, loves dance, loves the Spirit, loves the folk, and loves herself – “regardless.” This insistence on Black joy and self-love in a world that historically denied Black women both is itself a political statement. Walker specifically centers and promotes Black joy in a world that glorifies the idea of Black people being “strong” at the expense of vulnerability.

Clenora Hudson-Weems and Africana Womanism 🔗

A few years after Walker’s definition, academic Clenora Hudson-Weems developed her own framework: Africana Womanism. In 1993, Hudson-Weems published Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves, arguing that womanism should embrace an Afrocentric perspective and place the concerns of families and communities of African descent at the center. She took an even sharper break from Western feminism, arguing that its Eurocentric roots made it structurally inadequate for African and diasporic women.

Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi 🔗

Nigerian literary critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi arrived at her interpretation of womanism independently, asserting that the womanist vision is to answer the ultimate question of how to equitably share power among the races and between the sexes. Her 1985 work added a pan-African dimension to womanist thought, grounding it in African literary tradition rather than exclusively in the African American experience.

Other voices – Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange – also shaped the broader intellectual landscape from which womanism emerged, even as they sometimes identified with Black feminism rather than womanism directly.

Womanism vs. feminism: more than a name change 🔗

It’s tempting to see womanism as simply “feminism for Black women,” but that framing understates what makes it distinct. The differences go deeper than terminology.

The triple burden of oppression 🔗

The most fundamental distinction lies in what womanism is designed to address. Black women deal with three levels of oppression simultaneously: racism, sexism, and classism – and this is where intersectionality becomes central. Mainstream feminism, particularly in its earlier waves, focused primarily on gender inequality as experienced by white, middle-class women. This one-dimensional approach rendered invisible the layered realities of Black women’s lives.

The first wave of feminism focused on the legal rights of women but in practice ignored the concerns of women of color. Many first-wave feminists viewed the injustices faced by Black women as an unworthy distraction from the effort to gain gender equality. Even second-wave feminism’s embrace of “colorblindness” in the 1970s effectively sidelined Black and Chicana feminists, contributing directly to the emergence of womanism as a distinct framework.

Community and family, not just the individual 🔗

Another key difference is orientation. Hudson-Weems identifies womanism as “family-oriented” and focused on race, class, and gender together, while feminism is “female-oriented” and concentrated on biological sex-related issues. This matters because the historical experience of African American women cannot be separated from the community around them. Both Black men and women faced racial oppression under slavery and segregation, which is why womanist thought refuses to position Black men as adversaries.

Womanism focuses on achieving equity as a community – specifically for Black women, men, and children – in contrast to feminism, which has ebbed and flowed in its priorities over the years. This community-centered approach is not a concession to patriarchy; it’s a recognition that racial oppression cannot be dismantled without solidarity across gender lines within the Black community.

The purple and lavender metaphor 🔗

Walker’s most quoted formulation on this relationship is elegant: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” – using two shades of the same color family to illustrate that while there are overlapping similarities, there are differences that set them apart. Purple and lavender are related, but purple carries more depth, more richness. Some scholars interpret this as womanism being the broader umbrella under which feminism falls; others see them as distinct but related traditions. What is consistent is the acknowledgment that Black women’s experiences demand more than a rebranding – they require a genuinely different analytical lens.

Womanism in action: from theory to movement 🔗

Womanism is not just an academic concept. Its principles are visible in the social movements that Black women have built and led.

Black Lives Matter 🔗

The most prominent contemporary example is Black Lives Matter, founded by three Black women – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi – in response to rampant racial injustice. The movement is explicitly intersectional, attending not only to anti-Black racism but also to the unique vulnerabilities of Black women and queer Black people within systems of policing and incarceration. So much of the organizing and activism in the BLM movement draws theoretically from Black feminism and womanism in particular, according to political scientists who study the movement.

The “Say Her Name” campaign – which emerged from the BLM movement – is a direct expression of womanist principles, centering the stories of Black women killed by police who were often overlooked in mainstream narratives about police brutality. It insists that Black women’s lives are not a footnote to the broader conversation about anti-Black violence.

The #MeToo movement 🔗

The Me Too campaign was created in 2007 by Tarana Burke, a Black woman following in the footsteps of a long history of Black women’s activism against sexual violence and harassment. Burke’s original focus was explicitly on survivors of color – women and girls whose experiences of sexual violence were routinely under-reported, under-investigated, and dismissed. National studies show that Black females are more likely than white females to be raped or sexually assaulted by intimate partners, yet their stories have historically received far less public attention and legal redress.

When #MeToo went viral in 2017 following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it was largely white celebrity voices that amplified the movement – illustrating, in real time, exactly the dynamic that womanism named decades earlier. BLM was co-founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in 2013 and has had Black, female, and queer leadership ever since – yet both movements initiated by Black women faced challenges in keeping Black women’s experiences at the center as they scaled.

Womanist theology and cultural expression 🔗

Womanism has also shaped religious thought and artistic expression. Womanist theology emerged as a distinct field, taking up the color purple and its connotations of spirituality, royalty, and resilience to theorize Black women’s humanity and their practices of resistance, self-recovery, and healing. In literature and music, womanist themes appear in the work of writers like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and artists like Beyoncé, whose work regularly explores Black womanhood, community, and intergenerational trauma with an unapologetically Black-centered perspective.

Why womanism still matters 🔗

Even in the twenty-first century, Black women are more likely to experience violence, earn less for their work, and encounter fewer people who look like them in political office or mainstream media. Womanism names these structural realities and insists that any serious analysis of gender, race, or justice must account for how they combine. It refuses the idea that Black women can wait for racial justice to be won first and gender equality second – or the reverse. The struggle is simultaneous, which means the frameworks used to understand and address it must be, too.

Womanist scholar Layli Maparyan describes womanism as rooted in everyday methods of problem-solving, extended toward ending all forms of oppression for all people, and restoring balance between people and their environment. It is both deeply personal – rooted in the specific experiences of Black women – and genuinely universal in its aspiration. That dual quality is what makes it enduring. It doesn’t ask Black women to diminish their particular experience in order to reach toward the general. It insists, instead, that the particular is the path to the universal.

What do you think? The womanist framework insists that race, gender, and class cannot be separated when analyzing the lives of Black women – but mainstream movements often struggle to hold all three at once. Do you think contemporary social movements have succeeded in truly centering Black women’s experiences, or do they continue to fall into the same patterns that made womanism necessary in the first place? And in a world where “feminist” has become a mainstream identity, what does it mean that “womanist” remains largely an academic term?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/womanism
2. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/women-s-studies-and-feminism/womanism
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womanism
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/04/08/what-is-womanism-understanding-alice-walkers-theory-of-intersectionality/
5. https://blackfeministcollective.com/2020/11/14/alice-walker-womanist-movement/
6. https://www.thebridalbox.com/articles/difference-between-womanism-and-feminism/
7. https://lithub.com/the-foundations-of-black-feminism-and-womanism-a-reading-list/
8. https://www.gunnerdoyle.com/blogs/all/unraveling-the-power-of-black-womanhood
9. https://news.uci.edu/2024/03/06/uci-podcast-the-role-of-women-in-the-black-lives-matter-movement/
10. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/black-womens-activism-long-history-behind-metoo
11. https://www.wcwonline.org/Research-Action-Midyear-Brief-2019/does-metoo-represent-black-girls-experiences-with-sexual-violence
12. https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/intersectional-perspectives-on-social-movements
13. https://www.aaihs.org/womanist-theology-and-the-purple-perspective/
14. https://www.womanistworkingcollective.org/womanist