Alice Walker Biography

Events in history have influenced writers’ style, and the importance in their stories. Alice Walker wrote a novel which was very much subjective by the time period of the 1940’s. There was a great deal of bigotry and tyranny during that time, particularly for Women of color. Women were mentally and physically abused and belittled by man purely because of their race and femininity. Women were considered as ignorant individuals that simply knew how to handle housework and care for the children.

Walkers essay is great of getting her audience to reminisce on the past by describing some childhood memories of life on the farm with the use of her beautiful language to share an image in Walkers memory.

     Alice Walker is an African American essayist, novelist and poet. She is described as a “black feminist.”(Ten on Ten) Alice Walker tries to incorporate the concepts of her heritage that are absent into her essays; such things as how women should be independent and find their special talent or art to make their life better. Throughout Walker’s essay entitled “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” I determined there were three factors that aided Walker gain the concepts of her heritage which are through artistic ability, her foremothers and artistic models.

My paper literary artist Alice walker and visual artist Van Goth are best artist in the world, they have many similar things and different things, they are come from different century, different country, they have different family background, they have different work and life. People have different views on them. They both well know and both have a lot of fans in the world. Compared their difference and similar, life and work. We could links the two lives and their work together.

"Even though the faces...of the civil rights movement were men, the reality that we knew, even then, was that it was women. And now, of course, there are books and writings that tell us about the role of women...my mother was one of those women"(Henderson Daniel, 2010). Inspired by many black women around her as she grew up during the civil rights era, Jessica Henderson Daniel pushed her desire to make change for the very women she looked up to. Jessica Henderson Daniel was born to a military family in San Diego, Texas (MacKay, 2010). The education she received as an undergraduate at a historically black college university in North Carolina fostered her passion to make change amongst her own people. During the time of her undergraduate education, this was the height of organized and unorganized

Alice Walker is a very well-known and well respected author, she worked as a teacher, social worker, and lecturer, and took part in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Alice Walker’s life greatly impacted her monumental writing style, many of her stories have a young female character who is learning and maturing through different experiences such as the concept of death. Taking part in the Civil Rights Movement shows her bravery and that she will fight for what is right under all costs. This shows in her writing because her protagonists and usually very brave and strong through difficult times. Two famous short stories of Alice Walker are “The Flowers” and “To Hell with Dying”, although these stories have developed different

When we hear the term activist from the Civil Rights Movement, we associate that term with Black, religious men from the twentieth century that we most commonly learned about in our classes growing up. Those men were known for fighting against social injustices and impacting the lives of black citizens; they include Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. If someone like Rosa Parks were mentioned in class, we would focus more on her gender than her achievements. It was easy to assume that only men were leading and participating in the Civil Rights Movement. In her book, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, Rosetta E. Ross focuses on key women in the Civil Rights Movement who exercised their faith, despite the injustice that surrounded them, to improve the lives of others.

A Different Perspective In "Everyday Use," by Alice Walker, she elaborates on the relationship between a mother and her two daughters, who have two completely different personalities. Dee, also known as Wangero is Mama Johnson's oldest daughter, who is very outspoken , "worldly," and does not have the same concept of heritage as her mother and sister. Maggie is the youngest daughter of Ms. Johnson, who is timid and not as confident as Dee. Maggie also lives with her mother, since her sister has gone off to college. The three women have different concepts when it comes to heritage as they bicker over who should have handmade quilts passed to Ms. Johnson from her mother and sister, who she shared an intimate bond with unlike Dee and Maggie.

Roy E. Disney once said, “When values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” In “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker, this statement holds true. Through the eyes of the hard-working, single parent living in the south, Mama faces daily decisions that are often difficult. At the climax, Mama must decide whether to give the quilt to the daughter who seems to have everything, or to the daughter that is less fortunate. As any mother is influenced by their daughters, Mama takes sympathy for the youngest, while judging her oldest for her actions, behavior, and ideas that are very different from her own.

In New York City, Walker formed a collaboration with Gloria Steinem, they both worked at Ms. Magazine. Walker's role model was Zora Neale Hurston, a harlem renaissance writer. Walker even traveled to Florida to place a stone on Zora’s unmarked grave(biography.com),

Alice Walker, a feminist and theorist, who in her book titled, In search of our mother’s garden: a womanist prose, analyzes the modern feminist movement. She argues that white women have been focusing on oppression in terms of gender while disregarding the issues of race, class and sexuality. Due to this, Walker created the definition of a womanist; "a black feminist or a feminist of color, a woman who is interested in learning and questioning all things. A womanist is a woman who loves other women both sexually and non-sexually, a woman who appreciates and prefers women's culture, strength and emotional flexibility" (Walker, 27). The term “womanism” describes a separation present in the feminist movement in which more black woman stood to fight against the oppression of the image of the black women. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published an article in which she re-introduced the idea of “intersectionality,” arguing that the oppressions faced by black women can be “multiple and simultaneous” (Crenshaw, 139). The importance of intersectionality was also taken in note by Patricia Hill

In the short story, “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker there are a select few of themes and symbols. Alice Walker’s story telling on Mama, Dee, and Maggie’s life from when they were young until the present is crafted beautifully. The relationship between the three main characters is written throughout as Mama and Maggie sometimes have problems with Dee’s actions and responses. The most important theme in my opinion is the true definition of Heritage and understanding it. When Dee arrives at Mama’s house to visit she certainly doesn’t leave a good first impression with her new ways of life.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Alice Walker is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist was born in Eatonton Georgia, in February of 1944. Her work is based on economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Walker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple in 1983. According to PBS, American Author Eudora Welty was born April 13, 1909. In 1983, she delivered three lectures in which she traced the forces that shaped her as a writer, became her best-selling autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings. Welty won much praise and many honors over the course of her career, including Guggenheim

Alice Paul is one of the women who had a great impact on our society. She had a options and she made it known to the world. Alice Paul is a great example for women empowerment because she fought for all women's rights not just white women. She was rides by Quaker so she had a understand of how women should be treated. Alice Paul was apart of the women's suffragist movement of the early 19th century. My Alice Paul favorite quote out of the movie Iron Jawed Angels is “vote is our escape.” Once women started to vote the more opportunity would rise from their actions. Alice Paul was so involved with women's rights that she went to jail three times. One time in jail Alice Paul and a couple other women went on hunger strike. Paul also started her

Walker’s observations of the patriarchal society she lived in influenced her writings a great deal. She listened to stories about her heritage from her grandfather whom was very violent towards her grandmother (Edemariam). She modeled the character “Mr.___” after her violent grandfather who, as Walker said, “chased her grandmother through the fields shooting at her; missing only because he was drunk.” Mr.___ abused Celie a lot throughout her childhood and Walker used the character Celie to write about the patriarchal society that she lived in. Celie was very dependent on both her father and Mr.___ in the beginning of the novel, but experiences an awakening that makes her realize she can be an independent woman. This mirrors how Walker was a conformist for some of her life, and then became very independent and proactive in portraying this initiative to other women. Alice Walker had much respect for independent women, and this was evident in “Everyday Use.” There is no father figure mentioned in the story, and the character Mama does most of the work that a male would do in a typical household. “I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had