Feminism vs Womanism

Womanism came to prominence in the early eighties as a platform that voiced the needs of marginalized women. As a concept, it emerged from the African American community highlighting issues pertinent to Black women. Though the term ‘womanism’ was first used in 1863, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and connoted ‘advocacy of or enthusiasm for the rights, achievements etc of women’, the term gained popularity with Alice Walker employing it in her 1983 collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.

While feminism is very much woman-centred, Black feminism (the root of womanism) is family and community-centred. While mainstream feminism finds its base in white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s experiences, women of colour find their own culture-specific dimensions of feminism in the concept of womanism. Black feminism focuses on gender discrimination based on race, nationality and sexuality, but womanism speaks of the lived experiences of coloured women and their culture. Culture and spirituality, scholars such as Rose M. Brewer have explained, centre womanist thinking and are fundamental to its conceptualization. As different from feminism as womanism is, it is not a separatist movement but an inclusive concept that promotes the well-being of all humanity, irrespective of gender demarcations.

Since women of colour are thrice victimized on grounds of race, class and gender, these tri-axes of oppression constantly suffocate them, especially those hailing from the Global South. Therefore, feminists in the Global South began to advocate for a different stream of thought, rejecting the concept of ‘universal sisterhood’ advocated by mainstream feminism with angry protests against essentialism. It is interesting to note how in the essay, ‘Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory’, bell hooks rejects the need for any homogenizing in feminist struggles, writing: ‘[W]omen do not need to eradicate differences to feel solidarity. We do not need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression. We do not need anti-male sentiments to bond together.’

Womanism takes stage as a platform wherein Black women’s experiences and survival instincts are showcased. It serves to acknowledge and expound the power of Black women while recognizing a history of sexual and racial violence. On analysing Black women’s literature from a womanist point of view, aspects of race, class and gender intersect. In Buchi Emecheta’s literary oeuvre, too, we can trace the influence of the tri-axes of gender, race and class in African culture.