Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

by bell hooks

That means creating a movement that begins education for critical consciousness where women, feminist women with class power, need to put in place low-income housing women can own. The creation of housing co-ops with feminist principles would show the ways feminist struggle is relevant to all women’s lives.

In white supremacist capitalist patriarchal Western culture neocolonial thinking sets the tone for many cultural practices.

Privileged-class white women swiftly declared their “ownership” of the movement, placing working-class white women, poor white women, and all women of color in the position of followers.

Initially when feminist leaders in the United States proclaimed the need for gender equality here they did not seek to find out if corresponding movements were taking place among women around the world. Instead they declared themselves liberated and therefore in the position to liberate their less fortunate sisters, especially those in the “third world.” This neocolonial paternalism had already been enacted to keep women of color in the background so that only conservative/liberal white women would be the authentic representatives of feminism.

Radical feminists were dismayed to witness so many women (of all races) appropriating feminist jargon while sustaining their commitment to Western imperialism and transnational capitalism.

Such thinking merely mirrors the imperialist racism and sexism of ruling groups of Western men.

colonialism and neocolonialism.

Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally.

radical white women writing in Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain

“to not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present.

so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism.

decolonized feminist perspective

linking

the sexism, the misogyny,

mirror the sexism here in this country.

When issues are addressed in this manner Western imperialism is not reinscribed and feminism cannot be appropriated by transnational capitalism as yet another luxury product from the West women in o...

Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Zillah Eisenstein

as the rejection of false race/gender borders and falsely constructed “other”

“The emphasis on work as the key to women’s liberation led many white feminist activists to suggest women who worked were ‘already liberated.’ They were in effect saying to the majority of working women, ‘Feminist movement is not for you.’ ”

not

poor and working-cl...

reformist feminist...

achieving social equality with men of their class equated work with liberation they m...

Importantly the aspect of feminist emphasis on work which d...

was the demand for equal pay for...

Given the depressed economy white middle-class families would be unable to sustain their class status and their lifestyles if women who had once dreamed solely of working as housewives had not chosen to work outside the home.

If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better-paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.

Poverty has become a central woman’s issue.

Yet economic self-sufficiency is needed if all women are to be free to choose against male domination, to be fully self-actualized.

If welfare not warfare (military spending) was sanctioned by our government and all citizens legally had access to a year or two of their lives during which they received state aid if they were unable to find a job, then the negative stigma attached to welfare programs would no longer exist.

If men had equal access to welfare then it would no longer carry the stigma of gender.

Individual wealthy women, particularly those with inherited wealth, who remain committed to feminist liberation are developing strategies for participatory economics which show their concern for and solidarity with women who lack class power.

whether more women working has positively changed male domination.

Whether we are paid well or receive low wages many women have not found work to be as meaningful as feminist utopian visions suggested.

When women work to make money to consume more rather than to enhance the quality of our lives on all levels, work does not lead to economic self-sufficiency.

Unlike our older black women allies we had for the most part been educated in predominantly white settings. Most of us had never been in a subordinated position in relation to a white female. Most of us had not been in the workforce. We had never been in our place. We were better positioned to critique racism and white supremacy within the women’s movement.

Individual white women who had attempted to organize the movement around the banner of common oppression evoking the notion that women constituted a sexual class/caste were the most reluctant to acknowledge differences among women, differences that overshadowed all the common experiences female shared. Race was the most obvious difference.

I began to demand recognition of the way in which racist biases were shaping feminist thinking and call for change.

We knew that there could no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement were not fundamentally anti-racist.

The fact that participants in the feminist movement could face critique and challenge while still remaining wholeheartedly committed to a vision of justice, of liberation, is a testament to the movement’s strength and power.

Biased feminist scholarship which attempts to show that white girls are somehow more vulnerable to sexist conditioning than girls of color simply perpetuates the white supremacist assumption that white females require and deserve more attention to their concerns and ills than other groups.

but as the movement progressed evidence showed that there was also domestic violence present in same-sex relations, that women in relationships with women were and are oftentimes the victims of abuse, that children were also victims of adult patriarchal violence enacted by women and men.

“patriarchal violence”

the more accepted phrase “domestic violence” it continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination.

Often children suffer abuse as they attempt to protect a mother who is being attacked by a male companion or husband, or they are emotionally damaged by witnessing violence and abuse.

Just as a vast majority of citizens in this nation believe in equal pay for equal work most folks believe that men should not beat women and children. Yet when they are told that domestic violence is the direct outcome of sexism, that it will not end until sexism ends, they are unable to make this logical leap because it requires challenging and changing fundamental ways of thinking about gender.

Significantly, I am among those rare feminist theorists who believe that it is crucial for feminist movement to have as an overriding...

reality that much patriarchal violence is directed at children by sexist women and men.

The fact that many violent attacks on children are perpetrated by women is not equally highlighted and seen as another expression of patriarchal violence.

Had all feminist thinkers expressed outrage at patriarchal violence perpetrated by women, placing it on an equal footing with male violence against women, it would have been and will be harder for the public to dismiss attention given patriarchal violence by seeing it as an and-male agenda.