Set in the 1930s in the American South, The Color Purple explores the life of Celie, a young black woman in Georgia, trapped in a life of abuse and neglect. Through her letters to God, and later to her sister Nettie, Celie speaks of the abuse that African American women suffer at the hands of the white people, specifically white men. They are abused and demeaned, simply because they are black woman, worthless in the eyes of men. The mistreatment of African-American women that Walker writes about in The Color Purple are an all-too-real representation of the harsh reality for numerous African-Americans during the 1930’s. Racism and sexism were some of the defining themes of the 1930’s, and the black women in the novel represent the painful lives that many black women lived in the American South.