Tiana Mikes Project - Alaska Pacific University

Insights into Feminism 14
Womanism. “Womainist consciousness, or womanism, is defined as the integration
of ethnic and feminist consciousnesses among women of color” (King, 2003, p. 19).
According to Patricia Hill Collins (2001), there is debate regarding how the black
woman’s position should be labeled between “womanism” and “black feminism” (p. 9).
It is my conclusion from the review of literature that women are divided. Clenora
Hudson-Weems (2001) wrote about Toni Morrison’s “Cinderella’s Stepsisters”
concerning how women treat each other viciously (p. 137). According to Morrison, “I am
alarmed by the violence that women do to each other professional violence, competitive
violence, and emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave
other women” (Hudson-Weems, 2001, p. 137). Hudson-Weems believes that in order to
complete a key component of the success of women, women must cultivate a genuine
“Sisterhood” (p. 137). This supports Beauvior’s beliefs from the 1950s. Beauvior (1952)
believed that women fail to unite to fight together; instead, they join with their husbands,
fathers, or other men in different units (p. xxv). She states, “They live dispersed among
the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social
standing to certain men-fathers and husbands- more firmly than they are to other women”
(p. xxv).
Furthermore, the situation of women of color makes the division even more
complex. Black women inside and outside the feminist movement have always had their
own vision of gender justice (MacLean, 2006, p. 21). According to Kimberly King
(2003), “…for individuals whose identities are shaped by simultaneous membership in