Alice Walker: Women\'s Issues Alice

Alice Walker: Women's Issues

Alice Walker turned 62 years old on February 9 of this year (2006). She grew up in an era of revolution, when blacks and women were fighting overtly for rights that had been often covertly, but traditionally denied them since the beginning of this country. Alice Walker lived her life as a writer, winning every prestigious prize for writers available in the United States, writing about her childhood, her race's history and the state of being a black woman. This paper will review three publlications by Alice Walker that address these areas of her life. The first work reviewed is a book of non-fictional writings, in Search of Our Mothers' Garden, published in 1984. The second book is a book of short stories called You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, published in 1981, and the third is a collection of speeches and essays on various pertinent themes, called Anything We Love Can Be Saved, published in 1997.

The first published book we will look at is in Search of Our Mothers' Garden (Walker 1984), a book of nonfiction writing about being a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist, which she calls "Womanist." In Contemporary Black Biography, this book is said to frankly depict the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism, as the "women characters display strength, endurance, and resourcefulness in confronting -- and overcoming -- oppression in their lives, yet Walker is frank in depicting the often devastating circumstances of the 'twin afflictions.'" Robert Hendrickson also reviews this book, saying that Walker's statement that if the Civil Rights Movement "gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever," which also meant that it gave Walker the right to "claim the lives of African-American women of the rural South as the subject of her fiction." Matthew Fike remarks that by writing "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" Alice Walker hoped to "create a sense of literary continuity among black women."

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker 1982), a book of short stories with the theme of the Black Woman, written in 1981 was reviewed by Katha Pollitt in the New York Times, as a book by "a lavishly gifted writer," whose strengths lie elsewhere. "As a storyteller she is impassioned, sprawling, emotional, lushly evocative, steeped in place, in memory, in the compelling power of narrative itself." But this reviewer says the does not bring it off and that she is not a successful short-story writer. Other writers, speaking of these short stories disagree, such as David Bradley (1984-2) who says the stories show complexity and artistry and cites one of her characters as saying that white liberals "spoke of your writing as new in the world," meaning it was "new to them," showing their ignorance and then eye-opening experience in reading Alice Walker's writings. Michael E. Muellero in Contemporary Black Biography also says that her short stories expand upon the problems of sexism and racism facing black women and that the "oppressed woman comes through in all her writings."(1991)