Walker, Alice

The Personal is Political

Walker was a part of the second wave of the feminist movement in North America in the 1970s, one that was characterized by the slogan, “The personal is political.” Walker's essays are written from a personal perspective, where she uses personal experience and relates it to greater social and political meaning and critique. In her essays, she tackles the process of creativity, comments on the works of other writers, critiques the lack of a black woman's literary canon, and analyzes the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice causes. This approach was seen as giving voice and agency to women who occupied the domestic sphere, where they were only seen as wives and mothers, thereby reconfiguring domestic space as politicized space.

Walker has spoken and written about her relationship with her mother, which she characterizes mainly as supportive and meaningful. Mothering for her is about passing on a legacy whereby women achieve greater freedom and agency than the generation before.

When Rebecca Walker, her daughter, wrote a book not only attacking her mother's feminist ideologies, but also her ability to mother, Alice Walker and her daughter became estranged. Alice Walker does not publicly comment about her daughter.

Walker's female characters tend to be downtrodden black women who search for meaning and justice in their social context. Walker often imagines [Page 1255]endings in which her female characters achieve success or personhood. She has been criticized for these portrayals as being too idealistic and unrealistic. She has also been defended for these endings by other writers such as bell hooks and J.M. Coetzee for using her literary imagination for imagining a world in which black women can be seen to succeed and overcome their oppression.

Walker has been criticized by both black and white communities for her portrayal of black men as domineering, sexist, and violent, a stereotype that is common in white literature about black men. Other writers have argued in her defense that with so few images of black men in literature, Walker brings a layered and insider understanding of black men to the black community, and a critical perspective on the masculinity of American black men.

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