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How Is Alice Walker's Feminist Essay

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6700 Engwr 300 Essay 3 Dr. Jordan WC: Reframing Feminism for Black Women Beautiful gardens and handmade colorful quilts are not often the symbols of rebellion however, in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens these are the pictures of defiance. One overarching theme in Walker’s essay is the idea of a legacy for women and the ability to create art; a theme which is paralleled in the book A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which Walker quotes within her essay. Alice Walker quotes and adapts Virginia Woolf’s writing to reframe it for black women. She inserts and changes words to reshape Woolf’s writing to reach black feminists and tell the painful narrative of black women’s history. Intro needs to be expanded to be more than half the page because fuck. Alice Walker has respect for Virginia Woolf, she does not tear Woolf down in her essay, …show more content…

By using quotes from Woolf, Alice Walker is able to contrast her own experiences, and those of other black women, with Virginia Woolf’s ideas about feminism. Virginia Woolf was British and white and not poor; she had a prominent voice among peers and was held in high regard. Walker takes Woolf’s quotes and inserts blackness into them. Not only does she add black perspective into the quotes, but she also adds the horror of being black into them. She states, “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert ‘eighteenth century’ insert ‘black woman’ insert ‘born or made a slave’]” (Walker 166). Walker is inserting something Virginia Woolf never had to experience, the recent and painful history of being enslaved. The physical and literal oppression of the people Walker grew up around left scars on her community, but it also showed that women will create however and wherever they can. Walker counters Woolf’s thesis by saying that women can create without room or money and that in fact, they have been for generations. She uses the life of

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