Walker is associated with womanism, a term she coined in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1984). Developed over Walker’s years of creative work and activism, womanism is a useful lens for understanding Walker’s notion of Black female identity.

Walker offers various definitions of what it means to be a womanist, including “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior,” a “woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually,” a woman who “[l]oves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless,” and (finally and famously) “[w]omanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (xi-xii; see the 2004 Harcourt print edition for all references).

Womanism is certainly a counter to mainstream American feminism, which from its founding had obvious failings when it came to acknowledging the way that categories of race, class, and gender intersected differently for Black women. More than a corrective, however, womanism is about centering Black women and their experiences for the sake of nurturing Black women, their families, and their communities. In The Color Purple, we see various characters (not all of them women) struggling to define their identities on terms that allow for them to move beyond simple survival and on to thriving.