The struggle of black women in the complete collected poems of Maya Angelou

The analysis in this study focuses on the struggle of black women that represent in the poems. Then formulated into two problems; the first is how Maya Angelou’s poems describes black women struggle in her poems and the second is what struggles faced by black women in Angelou’s poems. To answer the question, this study uses intrinsic elements of poetry to find out how Angelou represent the struggle of black women in her poems. Then uses the theory of feminist literary criticism, gynocriticism, biography of Maya Angelou and black women movement in United States to find out kinds of struggle in Maya Angelou’s poems. The study used feminist literary criticism as approach to analyzing black women struggle in Maya Angelou’s poems. The result of the research shows that Maya Angelou represents the struggle of black women through the intrinsic elements of her collected poems entitles “The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou”. She represents that there is a clash between white people and black women. White people treat black women in a bad way because of their color skin. Black women struggle because of bad treatment of white people who consider them as slave. Black women struggle against male domination. Not only from men, but black women also struggle against white women standard of beauty