One of the reasons women did not have chances to express their creativity is that men did not consider women's work as good as the men's, thus women in the past trying to make a living from art was impossible. Virginia Wolf, a British writer who wrote about women's struggle as artists in the 1920s. In one of Wolf's most recognized works, "A Room of One's Own," she states that in order for a woman make a living as an artist, she must have two things: "a room of her own (with keys and lock) and enough money to support herself." (Walker 742) Women were oppressed so much in the past, Wolf wrote that: any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to

be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift of poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (Walker 742) Wolf wrote that about the women in the sixteenth century in England, but Walker showed that the same problem still existed during her mother's period as she transposed Wolf's words any black woman or anyone born or made a slave would have certainly gone crazed...For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift of poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts, chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (Walker 742) Walker's mother was a slave who did not own a room of her own, not even her own self, so how were Walker's mother and other slaves able to express her artistic talent when they spend most of their days working? "It was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write" (Walker 741) and "freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand mind with action did not exist" (Walker 741), so the slaves' only outlet for their suppressed talent was through singing. It wasn't about the hymns that the slaves sang, but the idea that they kept alive, the notion of song. The first black female poet of America was Phyllis Wheatley, "who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and mos

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Approximate Word count = 1043
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)