You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Themes

Hey, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down—especially the strong, ambitious, creative Black women in this book. These ladies are often beautiful—or at least attractive. They cherish their relationsh...

In You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, it's the women who are capable of deep, emotional relationships, not the men. That's because Alice Walker sees women as more complicated and nuanced than men. T...

In the immortal words of Soft Cell, tainted love is all some people can ever give. And there's a lot of tainted love going on in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. Whether it's a relationship disrup...

In the stories of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, manipulation mostly happens on two levels: gender and race. In her two most challenging stories, "Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells" and "Coming...

Let's face it: in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker shows how violence underpins pretty much everything in American society. Racially motivated violence dominates the world of these ch...

For the characters in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, the battle for their own identities takes many forms: fighting against the agenda of porn and popular media; pushing back on the fears encour...

Like most people, the characters in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down just can't handle the truth. The young girl knows that she's being raped, but she clings to Bubba's warped version of events bec...

Poverty, racism, sexism, violence, ignorance: you name the injustice, and Alice Walker has covered it in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. Every story deals with the legacy of slavery, and we're ta...

Not to drag you down or anything, but take it from us: if you're alive, you're bound to be disappointed. And if you're alive in an Alice Walker story, you're probably going to be more disappointed...

Where race is concerned, the fictional world of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down is not so fictional. Alice Walker writes from the perspective of experience with segregation—and from being on the...