After deciding to switch from what she described as her “tiny,” predominantly white liberal arts faculty after a number of semesters, Nalini Venugopal selected Rutgers College-Newark, largely due to its on-campus range.
“I didn’t need to be in such a white male-valued setting anymore,” Venugopal, a senior at Rutgers-Newark, recalled. However she additionally needed to discover girls’s research — simply not by means of an solely white lens.
“I struggled with calling myself a feminist for a very long time as a result of my earliest publicity to feminism was very white-girl, girl-boss, Barbie,” says Venugopal, a local of India who attended highschool overseas earlier than enrolling in St. John’s School in Annapolis, Maryland, for 3 semesters. In three semesters at St. John’s, she says, “I couldn’t actually discover any illustration of Indian People.”
So she was pleasantly stunned to search out Rutgers-Newark has embraced “womanism” — books, lectures, and courses that discover the American feminist motion by means of the writings of ladies of coloration, principally Black girls.
In contrast to early feminism, which focuses on the writings of white activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or “second-wave” feminism, represented by writers like Sylvia Plath, womanism facilities the experiences and ideas of ladies preventing oppression on two fronts: race and gender. Alice Walker, creator of “The Coloration Purple,” coined the time period in a 1983 essay assortment, “In Search of Our Moms’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.”
Inclusion, Not Exclusion
Whereas the time period is just not as broadly generally known as feminism, a rising variety of faculties are instructing the idea, if not explicitly the language. And a few college students are seeing it as a type of racial therapeutic.
Apart from Rutgers-Newark, different faculties which have programs centered on feminists of coloration embrace Purdue College, George Mason College, and the College of Akron. The studying lists are sometimes anchored with works by Black girls writers resembling Walker, Audrey Lorde, and Toni Morrison.
In a March 2025 publish on the Black Woman Nerds web site, author April Prince described womanism as “one thing that seeks to supply a extra intersectional and encompassing motion” than feminism. In contrast to feminism, which regularly facilities on the experiences of white girls, Prince says womanism “doesn’t ignore the precise plights of Black girls and different minority girls, versus its first-wave predecessor.”
The womanist perspective issues “as we search to deconstruct and handle the interior misogyny that comes from rising up in a patriarchal society in addition to a racist society, a homophobic society, and a transphobic society,” she wrote.
New College of Thought
Melanie Hill, a professor of American literature and assistant professor of worldwide social justice at Rutgers-Newark teaches womanist literature. She begins by introducing college students to the works of Walker, Adele Jones, and others. She says womanism “describes girls who have been daring, daring, audacious, and dedicated to the survival of a complete individuals, each female and male.”
“Feminism largely revolved round points that excluded Black girls and ladies of coloration specifically,” she says in an e mail interview. To appropriate that perspective, she says, “‘womanism’ was popularized as a faculty of thought.”
A psychology main minoring in social justice, Venugopal’s exploration of womanist literature started when she learn Morrison’s “Sula” in highschool. Morrison, in flip, led her to the works of bell hooks and different writers of coloration.
“That actually helped me perceive America and my position in it so much higher,” she stated. However at Rutgers-Newark, “the largest present was me getting professors who’re girls of coloration.”
Studying South Asian literature with Sadia Abbas, who additionally teaches English at Rutgers-Newark, gave Venugopal confidence in addition to the ability of seeing herself represented. The expertise, she says, helped her really feel seen.
“Think about Myself within the World”
“So typically, after we speak about being minorities and racial injustice, it may be so miserable and discouraging,” Venugopal defined. “I’ve all the time beloved literature as a result of it felt prefer it was giving me new methods to think about myself on the planet and easy methods to work together with it.”
Venugopal makes use of literature to think about lives totally different from her personal and to place herself in others’ sneakers. She recollects a quote by Audre Lorde from “Zami: A New Spelling of My Identify”:
“Each girl I’ve ever beloved has left her print upon me, the place I beloved some invaluable piece of myself other than me — so totally different that I needed to stretch and develop as a way to acknowledge her. And in that rising, we got here to separation, that place the place work begins.”
Venugopal says it’s a “disgrace” that womanists could be divided by language.
“Finally, womanists and feminists are aligned in the whole lot that they need,” she says. “There are variations in what they’re expressing and specializing in, however that’s not a factor to (trigger) separation. Phrases have totally different shades.”
“And within the well-known phrases of Alice Walker: ‘Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,’” she says.
