Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks

This entry has been edited to death over the past few weeks, so I figure at this point I’m going to just post it and be damned.

I’ve been making an effort to broaden my reading in terms of feminism, and I’m trying to introduce a steady stream of works by women of color. I started with Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks. I feel like the book has planted a seed. Some of the things she wrote about have given me pause to stop and think, but it has been difficult to absorb it all. I think I’m going to have to go back and reread some parts to really do it justice.

I’m sad to say that because I didn’t jot things down during the moments of saying “that’s so incredible!!!” this review may be a little dry. I am having trouble remembering some of the specific things that really clicked for me, so this is basically just summarizing some of what she addresses. (And I’ve learned from my mistake as I’ve been jotting things down every time I read something amazing in my current book.)

The book discusses the the black “matriarch,” that black women are strong, domineering, and in control of their families. The idea is that this supposed position that they hold emasculates black men and makes the traditional nuclear family structure impossible in the black community. This seems to be a pretty common assertion in the media and I had embraced unquestioningly, having never stopped to think about the truth of the matter or just how racist and misogynist it is. hooks debunks the idea of the matriarch and demonstrates how white patriarchal concepts of masculinity are projected onto black men. At the same time, I was really kind of floored at the way perceptions can take root when you don’t have a clue. While rationally I can see what she is saying, I kept thinking but it’s true!!! I think she also did a great job of tying in how black women were treated and conceptualized during slavery and how those attitudes have persisted.

hooks also points out the drastic ways that black women’s experiences have differed from white women’s. For instance, while white feminists were working to liberate women and felt the key to this was integration into the workforce, they were neglecting the fact that black women had been working outside the home for decades. Through this, she illustrates that the feminist movement did not take women of color into account at all, but rather only built on and considered the experiences of white middle to upper class women.

She writes of the racism of the white suffragists and the misogyny of the male leaders of the civil rights movement. Reading some of those things was pretty cringe inducing. Not only did the suffragists express racist ideas, but also they actively kept women of color feminists from participating in the movement. Hell, I don’t remember if she speculated or if this was fact but the white suffragists didn’t want the vote for all women, they were just miffed that black men, former slaves got it before them (by law, anyway). And while they were reacting to the idea that their place in the hierarchy was upset, black men in the civil rights movement were trying to push black women into white patriarchy’s ideal of woman-hood in an effort to claim some semblance of power.

I really like the way she discusses language – that when scholars are talking of “women” and “blacks” they are typically talking about white women and black men. So when people like, say, Betty Friedan spoke of “women” in the Feminine Mystique she was speaking for all women when only white women were facing the problems she describes. This writes out women of color who did not have those experiences and allows us to ignore the issues they face. From what I gather, this has been one of the major failures of the feminist movement.

It seems to me that this is one of the more basic books on women of color and feminism, in that it makes a good entry point. Despite that, it does make things considerably more complex and I know that I’d probably benefit from both rereading it and reading related texts.

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Tags: bell hooks, Books, Feminism, race