Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

-Bell Hooks-

The feminist movement that blossomed in America doesn’t cater “to all Women”. More than the clear manifestation of sexism in a patriarch structured society; it furthermore undermines class and race. The voice of black women in feminist movement is important because they are at the bottom of the occupational ladder, and whose social status is lower than any other group, thus they bear the brunt of sexist, racist, and classist oppression. Thus from this vantage point, black women have a unique perspective with which to criticize the dominant hegemony and create a counter-hegemony.

Important points as highlights:

  Feminism in the U.S. did not arise as a result of victimized women who are so by sexist oppression, standing up. (refers to mentally, physically, spiritually – beaten down, silent). The movement arose from what she will come to call “bourgeois white women” (college-educated, middle and upper-class, married white women, housewives bored with leisure, with home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life).

Hook criticized Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ignoring the plight and existence of non-white, and poor women. She assumed that her concerns were congruent with those of all American women.

White women in feminist movement Hooks states rarely question their privilege, or whether they have the best handle on the collective suffering of women, racism abounds in the writings of said feminists, which reinforces white supremacy negating the possibility of a political bond across ethnic and racial boundaries.

  She defines oppression as the “absence of choices” and is the primary contact between oppressor and oppressed. Hooks states, importantly, that under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women’s behaviors in some avenues while liberating them in others, this is what makes it so tricky a prison, in the absence of extreme restrictions many women “ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.”

There has been too high a focus on gender in women’s liberation movement which is not, according to Hooks, a solid basis for constructing feminist theory. Unfortunately Hooks states, this analysis tends to reflect Western patriarchal thought and mystifies women’s reality by suggesting gender is the sole determinant of women’s fate.

Black women are not in a position to be allowed an “institutionalized other”, they can not assume the role of “exploiter/oppressor” for who could they exploit or oppress?