Womanism

Origins and Tenets

According to Alice Walker who coined the term womanist, a womanist is one who embodies the following characteristics: a preference for women's culture, love for herself and other women, and a commitment to struggle and survival for all people—both women and men. The term womanism provided a more culturally appropriate alternative to the term feminist, which alienated some Black women, everyday activists, and academics. To be womanist is to position oneself and one's academic scholarship within the global struggle for the emancipation of women, including multiple issues related to health disparities, women's economic status, sexuality, political rights, violence against women, and marital and family status and rights affecting Black women in the United States and globally. Womanism is viewed also as a philosophical perspective. It is a way of thinking, acting, and being in the world—an epistemology, or Black women's ways of knowing.

A womanist is not a separatist, except periodically for health, and is traditionally universalist, redefining all people as people of color to universalize individual struggles. Womanism entails a pluralist version of social integration in which, as Patricia Hill Collins observes, women and men live together like flowers in a garden, without losing their cultural distinctiveness. Womanism is committed to eradicating sexism and racism and other “isms” that plague the human community, such as classicism and heterosexism, while making an ideological space for autonomous movements of self-determination.

Key tenets of womanism include multiple jeopardy, lived experience as a way of knowing and making meaning of the world, and a culture of resistance. Multiple jeopardy refers to the ways in which African American women navigate the contradictions of multiple, interlocking oppressions (e.g., racism, sexism, classicism), and multiple, interdependent identities (e.g., Black, female, working class). Black women's knowledge and meaning-making sensibilities are rooted in lived experience. The experiential aspect of knowledge and meaning forms the everyday theorizing of Black women and is often seen as counterintuitive to Western epistemologies. A culture of resistance has historically challenged and shaped Black women's communication. The culture of resistance marks African American women's personal and collective struggle against racism, patriarchy, and other forms of human oppression while developing means toward self-liberation and a more humane social order.

History

The history of womanism began with everyday Black women in the 19th century who were committed to empowerment and wholeness of entire people. Enslaved African women crafted an oppositional discourse that emerged as a response to the master narrative of gender, race, and class supremacy—a narrative that castigated, denigrated, and ignored the existence and humanity of Black women. Calling upon a legacy of resistance and struggle, Black women fashioned an intellectual tradition that had at its foundation ordinary women sharing the experiences of their everyday lives and that resulted in naming and thus redefining their identities. Black female slave narratives such as those of Harriet Jacobs, the antilynching rhetoric of Ida B. Wells, the Club movement of the late 19th and early 20th century with Mary Church Terrell, and the speeches of Black women abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, and Frances E. W. Watkins Harper.

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