Ain't I a woman

Black women and feminism

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bell hooks: Ain't I a woman (1981, South End Press)

205 pages

English language

Published Oct. 30, 1981 by South End Press.

ISBN:
978-0-89608-128-4
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5 stars (1 review)

A world renowned author, scholar, public intellectual, and activist, bell hooks was 19 years old when she wrote Ain't I a Woman (published ten years later). It was her first book, and one of the first published by South End Press, an independent, np, collectively-organized publisher dedicated to advancing movements for radical social change.

4 editions

How multiple axes of oppression work together to marginalize black women

5 stars

No one group is safe from bell hooks' substantial critique in her in-depth exploration of the oppression black women have to struggle against in the United States.

This book contains several essays, which deal with black women's struggle from the time of slavery to the time of publishing (1981). In them the author shows how time and again black women have been marginalized or excluded not only from patriarchal mainstream society, but also from white feminism and black liberation movements.

Nearly a decade before the term intersectionality was coined, bell hooks describes how the multiple axes of oppression black women have been struggling against work in tandem to silence, exclude, and marginalize groups of people; how liberation movements are split along lines of gender and race and ultimately loose their radicalness and strength while granting some of its leaders entry to the white patriarchal hierarchy.

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Subjects

  • African American women -- Social conditions
  • Sexism -- United States
  • Feminism -- United States