Coined by the writer Alice Walker, womanist literature principally centers the ideas and experiences of Black women, who are simultaneously fighting sexism and racism.
After deciding to transfer from what she described as her “tiny,” predominantly white liberal arts college after a few semesters, Nalini Venugopal chose Rutgers University-Newark, in large part because of its on-campus diversity.
“I didn’t want to be in such a white male-valued environment anymore,” Venugopal, a senior at Rutgers-Newark, recalled. But she also wanted to explore women’s studies — just not through an exclusively white lens.
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“I struggled with calling myself a feminist for a long time because my earliest exposure to feminism was very white-girl, girl-boss, Barbie,” says Venugopal, a native of India who attended high school abroad before enrolling in St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, for three semesters. In three semesters at St. John’s, she says, “I couldn’t really find any representation of Indian Americans.”
So she was pleasantly surprised to find Rutgers-Newark has embraced “womanism” — books, lectures, and classes that explore the American feminist movement through the writings of women of color, principally Black women.
“[Womanism] describes women who were bold, daring, audacious, and committed to the survival of an entire people, both male and female.”
MELANIE HILL, PROFESSOR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY-NEWARK
Unlike early feminism, which focuses on the writings of white activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or “second-wave” feminism, represented by writers like Sylvia Plath, womanism centers the experiences and thoughts of women fighting oppression on two fronts: race and gender. Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” coined the term in a 1983 essay collection, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.”
Inclusion, Not Exclusion
While the term is not as widely known as feminism, a growing number of colleges are teaching the concept, if not explicitly the language. And some students are seeing it as a form of racial healing.
Besides Rutgers-Newark, other colleges that have courses centered on feminists of color include Purdue University, George Mason University, and the University of Akron. The reading lists are typically anchored with works by Black women writers such as Walker, Audrey Lorde, and Toni Morrison.
In a March 2025 post on the Black Girl Nerds website, writer April Prince described womanism as “something that seeks to offer a more intersectional and encompassing movement” than feminism. Unlike feminism, which often centers on the experiences of white women, Prince says womanism “doesn’t ignore the specific plights of Black women and other minority women, as opposed to its first-wave predecessor.”
The womanist perspective matters “as we seek to deconstruct and address the internal misogyny that comes from growing up in a patriarchal society as well as a racist society, a homophobic society, and a transphobic society,” she wrote.
New School of Thought
Melanie Hill, a professor of American literature and assistant professor of global social justice at Rutgers-Newark teaches womanist literature. She begins by introducing students to the works of Walker, Adele Jones, and others. She says womanism “describes women who were bold, daring, audacious, and committed to the survival of an entire people, both male and female.”
“Feminism mostly revolved around issues that excluded Black women and women of color in particular,” she says in an email interview. To correct that perspective, she says, “‘womanism’ was popularized as a school of thought.”
A psychology major minoring in social justice, Venugopal’s exploration of womanist literature began when she read Morrison’s “Sula” in high school. Morrison, in turn, led her to the works of bell hooks and other writers of color.
“That really helped me understand America and my role in it a lot better,” she said. But at Rutgers-Newark, “the biggest gift was me getting professors who are women of color.”
Reading South Asian literature with Sadia Abbas, who also teaches English at Rutgers-Newark, gave Venugopal confidence as well as the power of seeing herself represented. The experience, she says, helped her feel seen.
“Imagine Myself in the World”
“So often, when we talk about being minorities and racial injustice, it can be so depressing and discouraging,” Venugopal explained. “I’ve always loved literature because it felt like it was giving me new ways to imagine myself in the world and how to interact with it.”
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Venugopal uses literature to imagine lives different from her own and to put herself in others’ shoes. She recalls a quote by Audre Lorde from “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”:
“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me — so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.”
Venugopal says it’s a “shame” that womanists can be divided by language.
“Ultimately, womanists and feminists are aligned in everything that they want,” she says. “There are differences in what they’re expressing and focusing on, but that’s not a thing to (cause) separation. Words have different shades.”
“And in the famous words of Alice Walker: ‘Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,’” she says.
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