Black Women of Our Past
Since the beginning of time, men were considered superior over women. Women were not educated. Many of them did not even have chances to express their creativity. Alice Walker addresses that issue in her essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." In the essay, Walker created images of the stifled women with stories from other writers and her mothers'. One of the reasons women did not have chances to express their creativity is that men did not consider women's work as good as the men's, thus women in the past trying to make a living from art was impossible. Virginia Wolf, a British writer who wrote about women's struggle as artists in the 1920s. In one of Wolf's most recognized works, "A Room of One's Own," she states that in order for a woman make a living as an artist, she must have two things: "a room of her own (with keys and lock) and enough money to support herself." (Walker 742) Women were oppressed so much in the past, Wolf wrote that: any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to
In one of Wheatley's poems written in 1776, she referred to her master as a "Goddess": "The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair, Olive and laurel binds her golden hair. Despite being the first black female poet, Wheatley was criticized for her "racist" writings because she degrades the blacks and literally honors the whites. I sang, with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise song" (Walker 739). With her masters' help Wheatley Received education that set her apart from other slaves. According to Poetry Today Online's biography on Wheatley, it was Wheatley's masters who recognized her talents, the ones that taught her how to read and write in English and Latin, and the ones who gave her access to their library. Walker wanted everyone to find a way to express his or her creativity. " (Walker 743) People should look at things from Wheatley's point of view before criticizing her. From her mother's own story to Phyllis Wheatley's; and from Virginia Wolf's attempt to help to Jean Tooter's. Hopefully people will find outlets to truly release their creativity. be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift of poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (Walker 742) Walker's mother was a slave who did not own a room of her own, not even her own self, so how were Walker's mother and other slaves able to express her artistic talent when they spend most of their days working? "It was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write" (Walker 741) and "freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand mind with action did not exist" (Walker 741), so the slaves' only outlet for their suppressed talent was through singing. It wasn't about the hymns that the slaves sang, but the idea that they kept alive, the notion of song. In 1923 the book Cane was written by Jean Toomer, a white writer who was raised in a black community and went to a "black" high school.
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Acceptance Essays
