In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens

5 Pages 1129 Words

The Legacies of Two Different Groups of Women


In her essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” Alice Walker builds a case about the legacy of women artists. Walker is searching for the African American women’s identity and the legacy these women left behind. In order to support her argument, Walker quotes Virginia Woolf in many instances. Walker often takes text from Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, and rewrites it. Walker changes a lot of Woolf’s text to portray the lives of black women. Walker’s text comes into “conversation” with Woolf’s because both texts are related to the argument that Walker constructs about the legacy of women artists. Walker rewrites parts of Woolf’s text and changes many of the words around, yet the meaning of the text remains the same. Even though Woolf’s essay was written by an economically privileged British white woman, Walker still chooses that essay because even though Walker primarily focuses on black women, she realizes that there are many similarities that exist in the circumstances of those two different groups.
Both Woolf and Walker argue that it was a common belief that women were responsible for the household work since they did not go out and work like the men and make money to feed the family. Walker describes her mother’s everyday household chores and says “she made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds”. Even though Walker’s mother did all this, she still “labored beside-not behind-[Walker’s] father in the fields” (Walker 168). Woolf argues that women were expected to contribute more to the household than men because they stayed home most of the time. Even though in Walker’s example women work side-by-side with men, their work is still not conside...