Book review: Ain’t I A Woman? Bell Hooks (1981)
By: Ester Pinheiro
Tags: Feminism, Slavery, Bell Hooks, Black Feminism, Black Women

Ester Pinheiro

The Sojourner Truth mural in downtown Battle Creek, Michigan. STEPHANIE PARSHALL;

“Ain’t I A Woman” by Bell Hooks (1981) aims to understand the impact of sexism on the social status of black women. The author documents the black female experience under both racism and sexism oppressions.

The term intersectionality is important to comprehend Hooks’ claims since it opens the understanding on how different sorts of oppressions intersect together. The word itself was coined in 1989 by the professor and writer Kimberlé Crenshaw, but its concept was already discussed by Hooks (1981), as sexism and racism were naturally “intertwined”.

Black women were deprived from their own racial, sexual nature and identity. The feminist movement was originated by and for white women and the black movement, by and for the interests of black men. The language was a potential form used to exclude black women, whereas the word “women” socially meant white women and “blacks”, black men.

As a result, black females found themselves in a double bind situation, not integrating in feminism nor the black movement. They did not perceive womanhood as an important aspect of their identity. Black movement (manly) in the 60s considered black females to have a “silent strength” — but they were writhed silently.

Hooks in “Ain’t I a Woman” advocates a discussion of racism and sexism in a feminist perspective during the 20th century, period when most black women feared to confront the racism of white women, the sexism of black men and both oppressions coming from white men.

Despite women’s liberation being present as inimical to black liberation, Hooks has been challenging the status quo as she opened a path for sisterhood against racism and sexism oppressions that she hopes women will take courage to follow.

Sexism and the black female slave experience

White male slavers exercised freely absolute power to brutalize and exploit black women without retaliation. They were severely lashed out and raped as an institutionalized form of terrorism to demoralize and dehumanize them.

Black women’s dignity was stripped, they had no names, no status and were treated as products of their masters. As they were used to working on the fields in Africa, black women were forced to assume a “masculine role” in America and oversaw household roles and farm labor, not being considered women.

By their brutal treatment against black females, white men exposed the depths of their misogynist character by institutionalizing sexual discrimination and sexist oppression. Since women were depicted as the originator of sexual sin, white men created a myth towards black women as the embodiment of female evil and sexual lust.

Their identity was imposed and based on negative stereotypes; besides, colorism was inherently part of this process, women with a darkest skin was regarded more sexual and morally depraved.

Continued devaluation of black womanhood

The predominant images of the black woman as the “fallen, the whore, the slut, the prostitute, the sapphire, the mammy, the uppity women, the more assertive, independent and domineering” are significant to the continuous devaluation of black womanhood since slavery.

Even though the matriarchal myth was less derogatory as the previous ones, black women were never matriarchs in America, they worked on menial jobs, they still held a subservient role at home and were not economically independent. Besides, their traumas in terms of racism and sexism were ignored.

This sexist ideology led to the assumption that black women demasculinized black men of being the “breadwinners”, so they were labelled “female castrators’’.

This premise led astray the attention from white supremacism and racism consequences on the lives of black people. It was a white scholars’ attempt to blame black women for the sexism they suffered from black male partners.

The imperialism of patriarchy

White racist oppressors were able to establish a bond of solidarity with black men based on mutual sexism and violence as they both saw women as a second sex limited of rights. The label of white men as “chauvinist pigs” provided a convenient scapegoat for black male sexists.

In the 20th century black women believed in the patriarchal society claims and angered about having to enter the workforce.

Black women decided to hear the “romantic visions of black men lifting women to pedestals”, (Hooks, 1981, p.89) but they forgot these pedestals were in black men’s hands where they could be controlled.

Black women in the 60s acknowledged and accepted sexism together with the black movement, which did not believe in the equality of men and women and reinforced sex roles.

In an imperialist racist society that supports and condones oppression it is not surprising that capitalism worked along with patriarchalism and makes the oppression of women a cultural necessity based on the American dream.

Racism and feminism: the issue of accountability

White women did not recognize themselves as racists, they were unwilling to distinguish between various degrees of discrimination. They were both sexist and racist and feared including black women in the female movement for sexual and labor competition.

Since slavery white women could best assert her power against black women and they continued to exercise that power by excluding them from the female liberation movement. They were basing on religious myths that claimed black women were immoral. They used feminism for their opportunistic purposes, as jealousy and envy for men’s power in capitalism.

They not only did not consider black women’s vicissitudes, but also used their struggle to compare their status in society as if they had been through the same sorts of oppressions.

The white patriarchal structure pitted women against each other to endorse divisiveness, so undermining a possible sisterhood bond between white and black women.

Black women and feminism

There were several difficulties in the establishment of the black feminism movement, as it was a secondary consideration for black women who were fighting alongside black males for racial justice in the 60s.

It is understandable that black women fear feminism, as they have seen and experienced rape, abuse, death, being ridiculed and mocked. However, Hook’s claims they could participate and create spaces in a female movement in which there is a re-evaluation of feminism in a radical restructured way, as black women did in the 19th century, denying the idealized womanhood from the Victorian age.

The speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth (1851) based on her own experience as a parent, worker (as a man), a woman who underwent persecution, physical abuse, and torture, highlighted not only black women’s identity in terms of race and sex, but their humanity.

Hooks (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press.