Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism

hooks opens with a discussion of the women’s liberation movement and its failure to include Black women in its activism. hooks explains that Black women were mostly silent during this period: “It was the silence of the oppressed—that profound silence engendered by resignation and the acceptance of one’s lot” (1). hooks proposes that Black women were conditioned to ignore and deny their womanhood through generations of violence and discrimination, and the prejudice they experienced was about their race, independent of gender. To accept that sexism was as significant of a threat as racism meant acknowledging that Black women faced a double-edged sword of oppression.

In the 19th century, Black women joined white women in the women’s suffrage movement. Women like Anna Julia Cooper and Sojourner Truth recognized the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism and how both marginalized Black women. However, the movement became more exclusionary when white men organized to give Black men the right to vote before opening the polls to women. hooks points to this fact—that white men were more willing to give rights to Black men than women—as evidence of how deeply ingrained sexism is in white culture.