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.