Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

by bell hooks

books had offered me visions of new worlds different from the one that was most familiar to me.

I was awed that books could offer a different standpoint, that words on the page could transform and change me, change my mind.

I could not truly belong in the movement so long as I could not make my voice heard.

Before I could demand that others listen to me I had to listen to myself, to discover my identity.

Mating radical feminist politics with my urge to write,

I decided early on that I wanted to create books that could be read and understood across different class boundaries.

Mama, who was herself held captive by the bonds of patriarchy, encouraged us to break free.

Even though mama has died, no day passes that I do not think of her and all the

black women like her, who with no political movement supporting

them, no theory of how to be feminist, provided practical blueprints for liberati...

coming after them the gift of choice, freedom, wholeness of mi...

It was the silence of the oppressed—that profound silence engendered by resignation and acceptance of one’s lot.

Contemporary black women could not join together to fight for women’s rights because we did not see “womanhood” as an important aspect of our identity.

Addressing the World Congress of Representative Women in 1893, Anna Cooper spoke on the status of black women:

It requires the long and painful growth of generations.

The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black women doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent.

Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, Anna Cooper, Amanda Berry Smith

Elizabeth Stanton

“Women and Black Men,” published in the 1869 issue of the Revolution, attempted to show that the republican cry for “manhood suffrage”

was aimed at creating antagonism between black men and all women, the break between the two ...

While many black male political activists sympathized with the cause of women’s rights advocates, they were not willing to los...

Black women were placed in a double bind; to support women’s suffrage would imply that th...

with white women activists who had publicly revea...

but to support only black male suffrage was to endorse a patriarchal social order that would gr...

The more radical black women activists demanded that black men and all wo...

Sojourner Truth was the most out-spoken black wom...

She argued publicly in favor of women gaining the right to vote and emphasized that without this right black women would have...

Her famous statement, “there is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a w...

and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs...

men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as ba...

reminded the American public that sexist oppression was as real a threat to the freedom of black...

Black activists defined freedom as gaining the right to participate as full citizens in American culture; they were not rejecting the value system of that culture.

Toni Cade’s article “On the Issue of Roles”

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

woman’s suffering however great could not take precedence over male pain.

When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize

their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage

to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression ...

and that is simply not...

Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive bl...

They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is no...

No one bothered to discuss the way in which sexism operates both independently of and simultaneously with racism to oppress us.

case in point is the following passage describing white female reactions to white male support of black male

suffrage in the 19th century taken from William O’Neill’s book Everyone Was Brave:

Their shocked disbelief that men would so humiliate them by supporting votes for Negroes but...

the limits of their sympathy for black men, even as it drove these former...

Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism.

In their fight for the vote, women both ignored and compromised the principles of feminism.

The complexities of American society at the turn of the century induced the suffragists to change the basis of their demand for the franchise.

The women Berg refers to are white women yet she n...