Women

“Women” is a free-verse poem by American poet, essayist, novelist, short story writer, and activist Alice Walker. It was published in 1973 in her second poetry collection, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, a National Book Award finalist. This collection arrived after her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970 and in the same year as her collection of short stories In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, which features her often-studied short story “Everyday Use.”

The “Women” poem and the entire collection are influenced by Walker’s involvement in the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements as well as her budding relationship with civil rights attorney Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal. While Walker is most famous for her novel (and subsequent movie and musical adaptations) The Color Purple (1982), she started to write poetry as a child and continued to publish poetry collections each decade of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Poet Biography

Alice Malsenior Walker was born the youngest of eight in 1944 in Eatonton, a rural town of Georgia, to sharecropper parents Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. After sustaining an injury from her brother’s BB gun that left her permanently blind in her right eye, she dealt with feelings of inadequacy and timidness and, as a coping mechanism, became drawn to reading and writing outdoors away from her large family. Walker particularly became a great admirer of Black female author Zora Neale Hurston, about whom she would write an article for Ms. Magazine in 1975. She was also influenced by her grandfather’s oral storytelling traditions.

Walker started her formal education at age four, a year younger than others because her mother had to take a job outside the home to supplement the family’s income. She worked hard, eventually becoming valedictorian of her segregated high school class, an honor that allowed her to attend Spelman College on a full scholarship. Here, she met Martin Luther King Jr., who inspired her to later join the Civil Rights Movement and help Southern Blacks register to vote. When her two professor-mentors left Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College on another scholarship. It was here and on a summer trip to East Africa where she wrote many of the poems that would comprise her first collection, Once (1968). Many of the poems were inspired by her abortion and subsequent suicidal thoughts during her senior year. She was able to pull through and graduate from college. Remaining in New York, she took a job at the Department of Welfare and met and married Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal.

Walker returned to the South where she worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and later became the writer-in-residence at two colleges in Jackson, Mississippi while she worked on her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Walker and Leventhal were the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since the inception of miscegenation laws; their presence led to frequent threats from the Ku Klux Klan. She and Melvyn had a daughter they named Rebecca in 1969.

Walker moved up North again to teach a course on Black women writers in Boston in 1972 and then to edit Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine in 1973. In the 1970s, Walker wrote her second novel, Meridian (1976), a reflection on civil rights, and received a second MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She also divorced her husband. In the next decade, her third novel became her most celebrated. 1982’sThe Color Purple highlights the shackles of a racist, patriarchal society, earning her the distinction of being the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1983, Walker published her first collection of nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. One year later, Walker collaborated with another writer to create Wild Tree Press, a feminist publishing company in California, where she was living.

Throughout the rest of the 20th century into the 21st century, Walker continued to lead a life of international renown. She wrote in multiple genres, including her 2018 poetry collection, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart, children’s books, and her regular blog entries at alicewalkersgardens.com. She has voiced her outrage at various causes, including Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and she supported charitable organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Walker’s ongoing studies of Transcendental Meditation have also found their way into her perspective on life and writing.

Poem Text

Walker, Alice. “Women.” 1973. Genius.

Summary

The first-person speaker lays out a general statement, referring to the title, with “They were women then” (Line 1). She then introduces the women more specifically as “my Mama’s generation” (Line 2). This group of women performed safe domestic duties, such as ironing “Starched white / Shirts” (Lines 10-11), as well as contributed to riskier activities with “How they led / Armies” (Lines 12-13) to allow for the education and opportunities of the speaker’s generation: “To discover books / Desks / A place for us” (Lines 19-21). This previous generation of women physically toiled, managing to accomplish what they did without any formal education: “Without knowing a page” (Line 24).