Gardens Growing Wild: When Womanism Outgrows the Fence

Alice Walker gave us the first doorway into naming womanism. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she describes a womanist as a Black woman who loves herself, her people, her culture, and the wholeness of life. Walker’s womanism is humanist, sensual, communal, and rooted in the everyday. It is a love ethic born from the gardens our mothers tended when the world gave them no land at all.

Alice Walker’s four-part definition of a womanist:

1.) From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious.

2.) Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally a universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?” Ans. “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

3.) Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.

4.) Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I return to Walker often because her definition feels like fertile ground, ready to support what needs tending to. And yet, as womanism migrated from porch to academy, from gossip circle to graduate seminar, something shifted. Something was lost in translation.

Because when I think about womanism, I think about my mother, my grandmothers, my aunties, my sister-friends – regular Black women making a way out of no way with a fierce tenderness no book could fully name. I think about the women who cooked the whole block into wellness, volunteered at church, told the truth with their whole chest, and kept the faith through storms that never made the news.

They were womanists long before the academy knew how to spell it.

Four Windows into Womanism

When I asked the FMN team what womanism means to them, their responses echoed the same tension I’ve felt for years: womanism is spacious, but our discourse about it has gotten cramped. And each person – across race, experience, discipline, and spiritual lineage – named a piece of the puzzle.

Casey

For Casey, womanism is a liberationist political lens anchored in Black femme collective experience. It’s shaped by foremothers like M. Shawn Copeland, Delores Williams, Ella Baker, Lucy Parsons, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers. But the academy’s grip has narrowed the field. Theology has overshadowed womanism’s queer origins and concentrated it into elite spaces where many Black folks can’t find themselves. Casey longs for interdisciplinary alliances, queer amplification, class consciousness, and a re-linking of study with everyday womanist practice.

Victoria

As a Latinx woman of color, Victoria approaches womanism through the doorway of liberation. She sees in it a familiar struggle: preserving culture, language, faith, and dignity while rewriting harmful narratives for generations yet to come. But she names a key gap – the bridge between the academic theory and the everyday practice. How do we translate this framework into liberatory rhythms, organizational culture, and communal life? How do we carry womanism from the classroom back into the kitchen, the sanctuary, and the streets?

Riana

Riana defines womanism as the centering and honoring of the lived experiences, needs, desires, and resources of all Black women – always for the sake of healing, wholeness, and communal flourishing. She wants more intergenerational conversation, more engagement with folks who hold multiple traditions, and deeper class analysis. Her bookshelves hold Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gloria Naylor, and the womanist theologians who gave her language for what she had already seen in her family and church.

And Me

My own definition has been shaped by the women who raised me, the artists who raised my imagination – Zora, Toni, Georgia Gilmore, Billie Holiday, Jazmine Sullivan, Glorilla, Megan Thee Stallion – and the scholars who raised my questions.

I want a womanism that makes room for the kitchen-table keepers of wisdom, the storytellers, the joy-bringers, the truth-tellers, the ones who choose survival and pleasure in a world that demands their exhaustion.

I want a womanism that isn’t assumed Christian, or neatly American, or tethered to respectability.

A womanism unafraid of sex work, conjure, rest, rage, and the wild freedom of Black women imagining ourselves otherwise.

What’s Missing?

Across our voices, a pattern emerged:

• Womanism needs more class analysis. It can’t remain a theory accessible only to those with academic credentials.
• Womanism has never been solely Christian, and our definitions must reflect the fullness of spiritual, religious, and humanist expression.
• Womanism must be trans-inclusive, honoring Black trans women as central to our survival and liberation.
• Womanism needs its queer roots restored, not just tolerated but centered.
• Womanism must return to the people, to kitchen tables, beauty shops, organizing spaces, playlists, and porches.
• Womanism needs intergenerational conversation.
• Womanism should return to engaging globally, not just through a U.S. frame.

An invitation

So where does that leave us? What does womanism become when we pull it out of the tower and return it to the people who birthed it?

I won’t end with a conclusion—only an invitation. An invitation to reflect, to remember, to reimagine.

Because womanism has always been the thing that keeps us alive and the thing that teaches us to dream beyond survival. It is the root and the rumor, the wisdom and the wildness, the practice that helps us shape the world we deserve.

Maybe the task now isn’t to redefine womanism from the ground up, but to tend the wild garden it has already become – to honor what’s grown, prune what no longer serves, and make room for what’s pushing up through the soil, insisting on life.