ABSTRACT
Fiction writer, poet and essayist Alice Walker centralizes black women's experiences, consciousness and culture from an African American womanist perspective. Walker derived the term 'womanist' from a black matrilineal folk expression, primarily to describe exponents of a black or coloured feminism. Walker interweaves African ancestral traditions with contemporary black culture, western literary techniques and generic conventions in a polyphonic discourse, invoking recovered and functional African American matri- focal creativities. Gender is theorized as fiction, shot through with fantasy, yet lived as fact, produced and struggled over within the regulatory daily practices of schooling. While proposing that a monetary value be attributed to all unpaid work, Marilyn Waring transmutes economistic categories by nominating that statistical indicators be related to qualitative assessments. Welfare measures range from basic protection against the risks of unemployment, old age, illness and disability, to more substantial support for childcare or parental leave.
