Women and Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

      We all know that society can often times value men over women. Being a woman in general puts you in a box that you have to fight to get out of and scream that you have a voice and you will be heard, however men are rarely to be put in this box in the first place. So if you are a woman, biologically you are already silenced and your opinion is dismissed before you can even open your mouth to speak. So now let’s say that you have two biological aspects going against your favor; you are a woman and you are also African American. This is a double whammy. The odds are stacked up so high in front of your face you can barely see the green grass on the other side. However, the author of Women and Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, E. Yvette Walters, convinces us that as black women we can see and have seen the green grass.

      Before black women were able to publish their literacy; they still had something to say. Walters gives her audience some examples of black women writers and the barriers that are broken down because of them. She celebrates the fact that for once the pen is in the black woman’s hand and they have the turn to tell their own story. She explains some of the different complex relationships that black women go through with themselves, their oppressors, and friends. These complex relationships are often themes in a lot of literature composed by black women. Walters analyzes one particular black woman’s work, Alice Walker. She is the author of the famous The Color Purple, which is originally a book that has been remade into a movie and rather recently a broadway play.
      This particular work has every aspect of the five major epistemological categories that Walters presents to us from which women view reality and themselves and draw conclusions about truth, knowledge, and authority. This information was collected from an intensive interview/case study approach of 135 women. The five major categories are: Silence, Received Knowledge, Subjective Knowledge, Procedural Knowledge, and Constructed knowledge. All of these types of oppression that modern day women experience are also represented in The Color Purple. Celie, the main character of the work, experiences all of these things as an oppressed black woman who desires to be literate and liberated from her box. So in this sense, Walters brings us full circle with the common realities we face as women regardless of race; the box still exist.