Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Introduction

bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins; she wrote her pen name in lower case) began the book while still an undergraduate at Stanford and published it in 1981. The title quotes the speech attributed to Sojourner Truth at a women’s rights convention in Akron in 1851. In five chapters hooks traces the sexual and racial exploitation of enslaved women, the continued devaluation of Black womanhood after emancipation, patriarchy within Black political movements, and racism in the white women’s movement. The book was read far beyond the academy and became a reference point for debates on race and gender in American feminism.

Connections

Taken up in

• Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex1989 · Kimberlé Crenshaw

More works by bell hooks

• 1984Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center