Womanist Interventions and Intersections

The three women usually described as the founders of womanist theology and social ethics were doctoral students at Union Theological Seminary when the novelist founder of womanism, Alice Walker. soared to literary fame: theologian Jacqueline Grant, social ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon, and theologian Delores S. Williams. Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, though usually not accorded the status of a founder, also studied at Union in the 1980s and was a founder. In the mid-1980s these four women conferred with each other and supported each other, donning the womanist label that Cannon was the first, in 1985, to embrace. Womanist theologians and social ethicists discounted Cone’s heroic male language of revolutionary liberation and his claim that Black people are united by the experience of suffering and humiliation at the hands of White oppressors. These twin features of Cone’s theology were too androcentric and reactive for womanists, who fixed on the moral wisdom that enabled Black women to survive centuries of racist oppression while holding together their families and communities. The womanist founders defied the competitive ethos of the academy. They wrote about seeking wholeness in one’s life, being attuned to the God within, working for justice, and building peaceable communities that enable all people to flourish. They created a womanist community in the American Academy of Religion, networking in assiduously nurturing fashion, except Williams, who mostly kept to herself. Yet Williams is the most influential womanist thinker, partly because she accentuated her negations.