Ain't I a Woman? (book)
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Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism is a 1981 book by bell hooks titled after Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, ISBN 0-89608-129-X. hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the seventies. She argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever black women spoke. Hooks points out that these white female reformers were more concerned with white morality than the conditions these morals caused black Americans.
Further, she argues that the stereotypes that were set during slavery still affect black women today. She argues that slavery allowed white society to stereotype white women as the pure goddess virgin and move black women to the seductive whore stereotype formerly placed on all women. This has allowed the justification of the devaluation of black femininity and rape which continues to this day. The work which black women have been forced to perform, either in slavery or in a discriminatory work place, that would be non-gender conforming for white women has been used against black women as a proof of their emasculating behaviour. bell hooks argued that black nationalism was largely a patriarchical and misogynist movement and thus that it sought to overcome racial divisions by strengthening sexist ones, that it readily latched onto the idea of the emasculating black matriarch proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan whose theories are repeatedly criticised by bell hooks.
Meanwhile, she says, the "feminist movement", a largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism. She suggests this explains the low numbers of black women who participated in the feminist movement in the 1970s, pointing to Louis Harris' Virginia Slims poll done in 1972 for Phillip Morris that she says showed 62 percent of black women supported "efforts to change women's status" and 67 percent "sympathized with the women's rights movement", compared with 45 and 35 percent of white women (also Steinem, 1972).
