Women & Literacy, The Color Purple.

In the excerpt, Women and Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, E. Yvette Walters goes into depth about a character that displayed many struggles that black women of that era went through and are still struggling past today. Black women as you know have been silenced since the beginning of time by their husbands or males around them as well as in white society. Being oppressed by two groups of people put a standstill on our literacy. They did not want us to be literate because we could rise above them. Therefore black women had to find other ways to liberate themselves from these people. Black women kept their stories alive through the art of storytelling. We had developed an expertise in this area and they were eventually allowed to publish stories. These stories have a central theme that was based on the development of the black woman. “In telling these stories, barriers, shackles, and obstacles typify an ever present element in the Black woman’s struggle for acceptances, power, respect, love, and self.”(137) Walters explains in detail the different types of feminism. Liberal feminism, the rights of individual woman who are trying to transform what it means to be a man or woman. Radical feminism, they say that the differences in our anatomy provide for a woman’s oppression. Pro-structural feminism, language patterns produce notions of gender. Social feminism, believe race, gender, and social status are all results of a patriarchal, capitalist society. She ends with black feminism, which is defining the African American woman’s struggle with race, social class, and gender. The Color Purple’s, Celie uses ways to rise to above her oppression and become the strong black woman we associate ourselves with today. Although, Celie was a silent woman at firsts she knew she had to speak up, not just for herself, but also for the rest of the women.