Book cover for 2003 reprint of Alice Walkers’ In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Mariner Books.
The term womanist was first popularized by the widely acclaimed 1983 publication In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, a compilation of nonfiction essays by author and activist Alice Walker. Although Walker is not the sole progenitor of womanist in contemporary black women’s literature, many women cite Walker’s definition as the source of their womanist ideas.