Honoring Women and Black History Month

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker is a collection of feminist essays, written very much about black women, but not exclusively -- it is about all women. Powerful is Walker's assertion of what poet Jean Toomer found when he walked through the South many years ago: "he discovered a curious thing: black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held." This seems a curious statement, and yet somehow rings powerfully true.

Walker is a very thoughtful and insightful writer. There is so much packed into these essays, one doesn't even know where to begin. One theme is the enduring resilience and strength of women. Similar to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, Walker examines women's ability to become artists, in this case particularly, black women -- women who were denied, among other indignities, the means to learn to read and write, or express themselves in any way. "How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive," Walker asks, "year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?" Walker refers to Phyllis Wheatley, a black slave of the middle 1700s, who was highly educated and wrote poetry, in reference to Virginia Woolf's essay; how was this slave able to become a writer if she not only had no money or a room of her own, but didn't even own herself? Walker continues with other examples of strong women, most notably her own mother, who ran away at 17 to marry, had eight children, did all the work at home plus labored alongside her husband in the fields.

The strength of women is inherited from their mothers, handed down the line unspoken. All of these women, says Walker, "our mothers and our grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see." This is the strength of women. Walker's works are a valuable contribution to the importance of women, regardless of race or color. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a must-read for all.