This past Sunday night, actress Viola Davis won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series at the Screen Actors Guild Award Ceremony. The 49-year-old made an emotional speech that both thanked the producers of "How to Get Away with Murder" and mentioned her four-year-old daughter, Genesis.

According to the Daily Mail, she stated, "When I tell my daughter stories at night, inevitably a few things happen. Number one, I used my imagination. I always start with life and I build from there. And then the other thing that happens is she always says, 'Mommy, can you put me in the story?' And you know it starts from the top up...

So I'd like to thank Paul Lee, Shonda Rhimes, Betsy Beers, Bill D'Elia and Peter Nowalk for thinking that a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old dark-skinned African-American woman who looks like me. Thank you to all the people who love me exactly how God made me - and that's my beautiful husband, Julius, my four-year-old daughter at home, Genesis, and my mother, Mary Alice Davis."

Davis has indeed helped to diversify the portrayal of women on television, and thinks that it is important to do so in Hollywood. According to the Detroit News, she said backstage, "The sexualized, messy, outwardly strong, inwardly vulnerable women I know in my life are anywhere from Size 0 to 24. They do exist in life. To me, that's where you can find the expansiveness of stories."

She continued, "We want to see ourselves. We want to be inspired by that. I sometimes want the fantasy, but more often than not, I want reality. I want to feel less alone when I look at TV."

Davis' win comes months after New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley called her "less classically beautiful." Davis responded, "I think that beauty is subjective. I've heard that statement [less classically beautiful] my entire life. Being a dark-skinned black woman, you heard it from the womb. And 'classically not beautiful' is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you. Now, it worked when I was younger. It no longer works for me now. It's about teaching a culture how to treat you. Because at the end of the day, you define you."