Phenomenal Woman: Historical & Literary Context

The Feminist Movement

As a poem that concerns the self-worth of its female speaker, “Phenomenal Woman” must be situated within the feminist movement. Angelou’s poem was first published in 1978, at which point the feminist movement had been alive for nearly a century. In the United States, the so-called “first wave” of feminism began in the late nineteenth century and lasted through the first half of the twentieth. This wave of feminism initially focused on winning women the right to vote. Once female enfranchisement had been secured in 1920, the movement shifted its emphasis to other matters of gender equity, though mostly for middle-class white women. A second wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s. This wave attempted to develop solidarity among women from different social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Second-wave feminism got its impetus from Betty Friedan’s bestselling 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Freidan’s book challenged the idea, dominant at the time, that women derived fulfilment primarily from domestic life as wives and mothers. By contrast, Friedan argued, women were unhappy with the limitations placed on them, and they wanted to pursue education, seek work, and express political opinions. The speaker of Angelou’s poem expresses a similar dissatisfaction, particularly with societal expectations for women’s behavior and appearance.

Black Feminism

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s broadly aimed to end many forms of institutionalized discrimination against Black people. In the wake of that movement, there arose a more focused effort to think about the unique forms of discrimination experienced by Black women in U.S. society. Black women intellectuals and activists developed a philosophical paradigm now known as “Black feminism.” This paradigm emphasizes the inherent value of Black women and the urgent need for specifically Black female liberation. Perhaps the first formal statement of Black feminism appeared in 1977, when a group known as the Combahee River Collective published a statement about their work. In that statement, the Collective emphasized the difficulty of “separat[ing] race from class from sex oppression.” These three aspects of oppression—race, class, and sex—must be considered together, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.” Angelou first published “Phenomenal Woman” in 1978, which places the poem in conversation with the Collective’s landmark statement. Angelou’s poem doesn’t make any explicit references to the speaker’s racial identity. However, considering that Angelou is a prominent Black poet, it’s important to situate her writing about women specifically within the Black feminist movement.

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