Four Women - Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 1990

Simone explained in I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters and Their Craft: "I am emphatically against the injustices of black people, of third world people. 'Four Women' came to me after conversations I had with black women. It seemed we were all suffering from self-hatred. We hated our complexions, our hair, our bodies. I realized we had been brainwashed into feeling this way about ourselves by some black men and many white people. I tried to speak to this in the song. And do you know, some black radio stations wouldn't play it? It is true what they say: the truth hurts."

This was used in the Tyler Perry's 2010 drama For Colored Girls, starring Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Loretta Devine, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson and Kimberly Elise. Simone's daugher, Lisa Celeste Stroud, performs on the soundtrack version.

Simone told New Musical Express in 1984: "'Four Women' was written overnight, but it took me four months before I had the nerve to play it to somebody because I thought it would be rejected. I played it for my husband on an airplane one day; I thought he wasn't going to like it because it was so direct and blatant."