hooks warned against valorising black women for their alleged strength in the face of victimisation: to be strong in the face of oppression (which she defined as the absence of choices) was not the same as overcoming oppression, and endurance not to be confused with transformation. Critiquing black male leaders for their support of black patriarchy, hooks quoted from men like Amiri Bakara to whom women’s equality was a white value to be avoided at all costs, being the work of the “devils and the devilishly influenced”: the black “brother” would prefer women to be women and a man to be “a ma-an.” The uncomfortable parallels are all too familiar globally in today’s fundamentalisms and misconstrued nativisms. Challenging the feminist effort to equate women’s oppression with the oppression of blacks, hooks argued that in treating women and blacks as analogous feminists showed that to them the term “woman” meant white women, and the term “blacks” meant “black men”. hooks argued that the American feminist movement, dominated by white middle class American women, was rooted in a racial imperialism which had misleadingly used the generic term “women” throughout American history while referring only to the experience of white women. Author, activist and academic bell hooks (Alex Lozupone / Wikimedia Commons) bell hooks’ first book took American feminism head-on.Īin’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), published when bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins) was 29, took American feminism head-on.

Nearly 130 years later it became the title of an iconic book authored by recently-deceased revolutionary writer, activist, critic and academic bell hooks (the mystifying lower case being her way of asserting that her books mattered more than she did).

And ain’t I a woman?” That jeering four-word query, repeated several times over, emphasized the inequities faced by black women as well as her right to be treated on par with all men. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages,” she said, “and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. The year was 1851, 10 years before the start of the American Civil War, and the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, had an explosive surprise in store when Sojourner Truth, a spirited woman of colour, who had experienced and confronted the excesses of American slavery, took the stage to draw on her experiences and highlight the differing realities of women’s lives.

Feminist theory by bell hooks