Womanism vs Feminism
Understanding the distinction between womanism and feminism, and why intersectionality matters.
There's this quote, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."
It was written by Audre Lorde, who identified as a "womanist".
At first I was confused by the term "womanist", as it seems to be a needless synonym for feminist. However, it is not. Womanism is actually a superset of feminism, which has had various iterations ("waves"), all of which seem to address the problem of intersectionality by ignoring it. In other words, the female experience can be different depending on your race, and feminism does little to address this, even in its latest "wave".
The History
Early feminist activism around suffrage (first-wave feminism) in the United States largely excluded non-white women, as non-white women were not seen as feminine in the same ways as white women and therefore did not merit full inclusion.
The rise of second-wave feminism brought greater inclusivity of non-white women within the movement. However, white feminists equated this inclusion with "colorblindness" and preferred to deemphasize racial issues in favor of focusing exclusively on gender concerns. An inability to reconcile this division ultimately hampered the ability of white and non-white feminists to create a functional interracial movement. As a result of this disconnect between the groups, a third-wave feminism began that incorporated the concepts of intersectionality and womanism.
Two Interpretations
The historic exclusion of black women from the broader feminist movement has resulted in two interpretations of womanism:
Some womanists believe that the experience of black women will not be validated by feminists to be equal to the experience of white women because of the problematic way in which some feminists treated blackness throughout history. As such, womanists do not see womanism as an extension of feminism, but rather as a theoretical framework which exists independent of feminist theory. This is a departure from the thinking of black feminists who have carved their own space in feminism through academia and activism.
However, not all womanists hold this view of womanism as distinct from feminism. The earliest conception of womanism is expressed in Alice Walker's statement "womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender". Under this rubric, the theories appear intimately tied, with womanism as the broad umbrella under which feminism falls.
Alice Walker, who by the way wrote "The Color Purple", is credited with coining the term "womanist" in a short story, "Coming Apart", in 1979.
Surprisingly, womanism and feminism are totally different things.