Womanist Theory Presentation

Alice Walker coined the term, ‘Womanist”

“Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, female and male, as well as the valorization of women’s’ work in all their varieties and multitudes”

Feminism is to Womanism as purple is to lavender

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “Womanist Ideals and the Sociological Imagination”

• Is there a distinct Black female culture or if Black females have more in common with White females rather than the facticity of African-American life
• Black women’s experiences have been excluded from the consideration in that their experiences have been excluded from consideration in the literature of White Feminists
• Classical and popular literature popularized and valorized the White male with the patriarchal ideals of physical aggression, heroic conquest and intellectual dominance,  the Black male was not
• With diminished masculinity, the Black struggle for justice and equal opportunity was reduced to beat one’s wife and a refusal to exercise the rights that White men have
• There has been a refusal of Black women to recognize the true value of Black men

Phillips, Layli and Barbara McCaskill, “Who’s Schooling Who? Black Women and the

Bringing of the Everyday into Academe, or Why We Started “The Womanist”

• Black women intellectuals have needed to bridge the gap between the academy and the everyday
• The academy has nothing to gain from everyday Black women
• Black women in the Academy bring with them different kinds of lives that are shaped by the ubiquitous and historical fact of triple oppression, i.e., gender, class and race
• Black women have endure experiences that have been appropriated, exploited, misconstrued and ultimately dismissed
• The lives of Black women are not to be defined by their triple oppression, but by the intergenerationally transmitted experiential and metatheoretical frameworks on their Ancient African origins

Williams, Delores, “Womanist/Feminist Dialogue: Problems and Possibilities”

• Goals of both should be to evolve a world in which sexual, racial class and caste oppression no longer exists, “there is tension between the two”
• Problems arise out of vocabulary that feminist use that has been in vogue in the academy for some time, i.e., theory, argument and privilege

Williams, Shirley Ann, “Some Implications of Womanist Theory”

• Williams is a sociologist and instructor in a predominantly White University with a small population of minority students. They tell her that she is teaching the class for White students
• Sociologists have not embraced the term Womanist in the same way that theologians, ethicists and others in religious studies have
• The major difference in Black feminist thought is its source, philosophical and sociopolitical treatises or it can be narrative, e.g., life experiences, blues and literature
• From a sociological perspective, the Womanist idea is a way of both reading and hearing. The oral tradition is invoked here.