B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism
devotes herself to the liberation of black women and connects her destiny with all the black women?s. Walker herself illustrates what a womanist should be like and be responsible for. In the first interpretation, Walker marks the womanist from race, i.e. the colored, love of beauty and a respect for strength (Walker 1985, 2379-2382). Walker?s last definition of the womanist may be the most misunderstanding one. “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.” This interpretation contains two meanings. One is that womanism and feminism are not two totally different schools. They have something in common. Both of them, for example, serve for women?s liberation. Anyhow, as lavender is much lighter than purple, feminism has less connotations than womanism. One of the reasons is that the main-stream white feminism usually ignores the existence of black women and other colored women. In the prologue to her book, The Female Imagination, Patricia Meyer Spacks attempts to explain why her book deals solely with white women in the “Anglo-American literary tradition”.She said so because she did not have such experience of Third World female psychology in America. As a white woman, she would rather choose to describe familiar experience which belonged to a familiar culture setting. While Walker?s answer to her explanation is that “yet Spacks never lived in nineteenth-century Yorkshine, so why theorize the Bronts?” (Walker 1983, 372). It is not her experiences that stop her doing so, but it is she herself that does not want to. On an exhibition of
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B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism
women painters at the Brooklyn M