You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1981, the year before The Color Purple. The collection is more formally adventurous and politically confrontational than Walker’s first story collection, In Love and Trouble (1973). Where the earlier book worked primarily within the conventions of Southern realist fiction, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down experiments with form: stories that incorporate letters, diary entries, film treatments, and essayistic passages; stories that address their own construction; stories that refuse conventional closure.
The subject matter is equally bold. “Coming Apart” addresses a Black couple’s conflict over the husband’s use of pornography, and Walker’s analysis of pornography as a racial as well as sexual exploitation was groundbreaking in 1981 — predating the broader feminist anti-pornography movement’s engagement with race. “Advancing Luna — and Ida B. Wells” confronts the explosive intersection of interracial rape and civil rights activism, and refuses to resolve the contradictions it uncovers. “The Abortion” deals with reproductive choice in the specific context of a young Black woman’s life with a directness unusual for the period.
The collection establishes many of the positions that Walker would elaborate in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and The Color Purple: that Black women’s experience requires its own analytical framework (not white feminism applied to Black women, not Black nationalism that ignores gender), and that the personal — sexuality, the body, domestic life — is always already political.
Collecting You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1981): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40