WOMANIST NOUN (PEOPLE AND SOCIETY)

In the US: a Black feminist or feminist of colour. Also, a woman who prefers the company and culture of women, but who is committed to the wholeness of the entire people. Etymology: Formed by adding the suffix -ist (as in feminist) to woman, on the model of a Black English word womanish meaning 'wilful, grown up (or trying to be too soon)', as in an expression which Black mothers might use to their daughters: 'You acting womanish.' Womanist had been independently formed several hundred years ago in the sense 'a womanizer', but this usage did not catch on. History and Usage: The word womanist was coined by the American Black woman writer Alice Walker as a deliberate attempt to challenge the racist implications of the feminist movement, which found it necessary to speak of a separate category of 'Black feminism' and which thereby excluded Black women from mainstream feminism. Some of the followers of womanism see in it a more general challenge to the content of radical White feminism as well, offering a less aggressive and more positive view of womanhood as contributing to the community as a whole. As Alice Walker has written in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983): Women who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people (and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males. My own term for such women would be 'womanist'...It would have to be a word that affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world. Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender. Alice Walker In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983), p. xii I've been female so long that I'd be stupid not to be on my own side but if I have to be an 'ist' at all I'd rather be a womanist. The feminists lost me because they can't laugh at themselves. Maya Angelou in Daily Telegraph 26 Oct. 1985, p. 11 I suppose I forgot I was talking to a womanist. Alice Walker Temple of My Familiar (1989), p. 320