The Representation of African American Women in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

ABSTRACT
African American women are merely half of the Black race, and they are half of the African
American history, as well. The main objective of this paper is to show how the institution of slavery
influenced lives of African American women and how they are conceived by the American society. This
paper is in part an attempt to address the problems of race and gender faced by African American women
during the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Movement, by suggesting how those problems shifted over
the course of two centuries.

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WSN 7 (2015) 185-222