Aint I a Woman

bell hooks writes Aint I a Woman and draws the experience, struggle and perspective of the black woman into the conversation around redemption and affirmation. She brought the black woman in because she knew that the black woman was not being given space in the black mans fight for recognition and self-affirmation nor the white woman's fight for feminism. Hooks gives that space to the black woman to exist in her own right as part of the black liberation struggle and the feminist movement, in hopes of elaborating on the double burden they struggled with. And because they struggled with the oppression of their race and their gender, hooks explains that the black woman was forced to side with the emancipation of just one part of herself. The creation of a divorced binary emancipation left out the black woman who needed both, who was both- as hooks writes "Twentieth century black women had learned to accept sexism as natural, a given, a fact of life" (hooks 4). The sexism they had to endure wasn’t without reason, as hooks enlightens us with the benefits of the suppression of the black women. She explains that black women were expected and told to do domestic work and "breed warriors for the revolution" though as we have seen that the black woman had experienced just as much of the wrath and hard labour of slavery as a black man. The women had been whipped, lashed, forced to work in the fields, slept on empty stomachs next to the black man yet the women's experience was invalidated, it was in fact, a lesser struggle "for woman's suffering however great could not take precedence over male pain" - so she was asked to stay home and take care of the kids. And not because men were incapable but because "Black women must be supportive and patient so that black men can regain their manhood" (hooks 5).

This reminds me of an earlier discussion we had about how due to the wonders of colonization, the men who controlled the land, who grew crops and shelters and homes on the soil of their forefathers, suffered a great loss- a loss of control over their livelihood. So when man lost his control and authority over his right to live and earn as a free man, the only place he could expend it, was the private sphere. The home, the family, the woman. It was necessary that the stature of a woman remain subjugated for a man to feel like a man in all his manhood. "What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy" (hooks 5). Their call for emancipation from male oppression was redirected as they were told again and again that their freedom was not in liberation but from acceptance and forbearance. In this, hooks explains how feminism and the black liberation struggle falls short and remains incomplete without the voice of the black women, who represents the interrelation of the issue of race and sex for all of humanity.