【正文】 ecame the League of Women Voters. The first wave of American feminism focused on the suffrage right for women but was not very successful. However, there was some progress in the reform of property laws and educational opportunities and “it did lay some of the intellectual groundwork for the second wave of American feminism ” (Madsen 6). The Second Wave of American Feminism: 1960sThe second wave of American feminism began with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963. Later, Friedan founded the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966, marking the formal beginning of the second movement of American Feminism. The main concern of the movement was against different kinds of discrimination, especially sexbased, of women in a patriarchy society. With the development of feminist activism, feminist theories in the areas of literature, politics, philosophy and history also began to rise. Many women’s study programmes emerged in America. “The first full Women’s programme was set up at San Diego State College in 1970” (Leitch 325). The intended aim of the organization was “to change the sexist bias of traditional education and social practices” (Madsen 15). In literary critical field, traditional criticism became the target of feminist theory because of its blindness to gender. The pioneer in this field was Kate Miller, the author of Sexual Politics (1971). Other critics working in this field included Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Nina Baym and so on. They aimed to help people recognize women’s value by criticizing the images of women in literary works and “define a tradition of women’s writing by finding and publishing the work of neglected writers ” (Madsen 1516). Different schools of feminism also appeared during the two periods of feminist movements, such as Liberal Feminism, Marxist Feminism, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Ecofeminism, Socialist Feminism, Feminism of Color and so on. And it was the Feminism of Color that shaped the real backbone of Alice Walker’s womanism.American feminism continued, more and more colored women gradually realized that they had been excluded from the mainstream white feminism, which only paid attention to white middle class women. Therefore, different kinds of colored feminism appeared. They were Black Feminism, Chicana/Latina Feminism, Native Feminism and Asian Feminism (Madsen 216). Each group of them had a distinctive historical experience in America. From the first wave of American feminism, the white leaders did not pay any attention to the relationship between racial prejudice and gender discrimination. Angela Y. Davis, a black feminist, quoted Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s letter to the New York Standard in 1865 in her book Women, Race and Class (1981): “in fact, it is better [for black women] to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one” (70). The second wave of American feminism still did little “to recognize the interdependence of racism and sexism as symptomatic of a culture of oppression” (Madsen 215). In her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks (sic) criticized the blindness of color in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963): Friedan’s famous phrase, “the problem that has no name”, actually referred to the plight of a selected group of collegeeducated, middle and upper class, married white women housewives bored leisure, who wanted more out of life. That “more” she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all nonwhite women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure housewife.In 1973, a special Black Feminist group, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), was founded in New York. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a Black Feminist group in Boston, announced in the famous A Black Feminist Statement “Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. We realized that only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our munity which allows us to continue our struggle and work”.Other female black writers and critics, like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Huston, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Patricia Hill Collins, promoted the development of Black Feminism greatly by their vigorous participation and works. Alice Walker especially stood out among them. In her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), she put forward a very important icon for black feminist: womanism, which will be discussed in detail in the next part. Walker’s Definition of WomanismDefinitely, a womanist should be a woman。 however, the point is for which sex a womanist should serve. First, Walker indicates that a womanist should love other women, sexually and nonsexually, which means both lesbians and nonlesbians can be the womanist. It also emphasizes sisterhood. In Walker’s works, the good relationship among women can be found everywhere. As in Meridian, the protagonist, Meridian, helps “Wile Chile” when she hears that “Wile Chile” is pregnant. In The Color Purple, the lesbian love between Celie and Shug, and the friendships among Celie, Shug, Sophie, Nettie and etc. which will be discussed in detail later in this thesis, illustrate the important effect of sisterhood on the liberation of black women. She also emphasizes women’s culture and women’s emotion. When she wrote The Color Pu