Considered to be a feminist declaration, They Were Watching God, written by Zora Nealer Hurston, a black writer of South Florida, is a novel published in 1937 telling the story of a black woman who seeks for happiness, love and identity within a society full of prejudices and racism of color and gender. Through the main character of the novel, Janie, the author represents a reality of the black women of the epoch fighting for a space in society, independence and self-realization, some say Janie is the depiction of Hurston at the time she wrote the novel, a very wise way to raise the voice against a society ruled by men, and by white male that saw women as merely mules. Janie becomes the model to follow by women in their struggle to rise over the impediments of the social circumstances, seeing their real potential and virtues as women to take part in the construction of an equal society different from the society men had left them through centuries (Dilbeck, 2008). A particular feature of the novel is that Hurston wrote the story using the rich and particular spoken dialect patterns of the Southern Negroes.
Black women, since they were brought to serve as slaves in the American continent their lives drastically changed. Exploited because of their class, color, sex, black women became easy targets for white men to rape them, and/ or toys for black males who powerless against their owners used to outburst against their women. Recounting slavery as a social phenomenon of the past, black women were not distinct of black men, they were workers, and any other condition was a dream. Together black men and women served the same destiny, worked under the same conditions because they were animals. Some tales of those days even tell that many women preferred to kill their born children to spare them slavery, however, for most of them, their children deserved a different future, and when slavery was abolished, the inheritance left to free women by their parents was a legacy of a new model of womanhood, hard work, determination, self-dependence, resistance and insistency on rights of sexual equality and rights to be active part of the society they were part of, not excluded from it. Even though at the time Hurston literarily presented the reality of black women through They Were Watching God men said women needed protection rather than rights. The novel renders real problems of racial and gender identity of women through supportive relationships with upholding black men and destructive relations with burdensome black men.
Some critics of the novel say that They Were Watching God represents the social problem of racism at the time it was published, because of Hurston´s socialization with the Harlem Renaissance, but according to Alice Walker (Walker, 1979) although race is mentioned in the book it is not the main topic, and it would be not reasonable to think of Hurston involved in …