Ain't I a Woman

by bell hooks

  White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word “woman” to refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it served two purposes. First, it allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on shared racial imperialism. Second, it made it possible for white women to act as if alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society, and by so doing they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism. Had feminists chosen to make explicit comparisons between the status of white women and that of black people, or more specifically the status of black women and white women, it would have been more than

  obvious that the two groups do not share an identical oppression. It would have been obvious that similarities between the status of women under patriarchy and that of any slave or colonized person do not necessarily exist in a society that is both racially and sexually imperialistic. In such a society, the woman who is seen as inferior because of her sex can also be seen as superior because of her race, even in relationship to men of another race. Because feminists tended to evoke an image of women as a collective group, their comparisons between “women” and “blacks” were accepted without question. This constant comparison of the plight of “women” and “blacks” deflected attention away from the fact that black women were extremely victimized by both racism and sexism—a fact which, had it been emphasized, might have diverted public attention away from the complaints of middle and upper class white feminists.

  Just as 19th century white woman’s rights advocates attempted to make synonymous their lot with that of the black slave was aimed at drawing attention away from the slave toward themselves, contemporary white feminists have used the same metaphor to attract attention to their concerns. Given that America is a hierarchical society in which white men are at the top and white women are second, it was to be expected that should white women complain about not having rights in the wake of a movement by black people to gain rights, their interests would overshadow those of groups lower on the hierarchy, in this case the interests of black people. No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women’s movement. Speaking about the purpose of a metaphor, Ortega Y Gasset comments:

  A strange thing, indeed, the existence in many of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another— from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second. The metaphor disposes of an object by having it masquerade as something else. Such a procedure would make no sense if we did not discern beneath it an instinctive avoidance of certain realities.

  When white women talked about “Women as Niggers,” “The Third World of Women,” “Woman as Slave,” they evoked the sufferings and oppressions of non-white people to say “look at how bad our lot as white women is, why we are like niggers, like the Third World.” Of course, if the situation of upper and middle class white women were in any way like that of the oppressed people in the world, such metaphors would not have been necessary. And if they had been poor and oppressed, or women concerned about the lot of oppressed women, they would not have been compelled to appropriate the black experience. It would have been sufficient to describe the oppression of woman’s experience. A white woman who has suffered physical abuse and assault from a husband or lover, who also suffers poverty, need not

  compare her lot to that of a suffering black person to emphasize that she is in pain.

  If white women in the women’s movement needed to make use of a black experience to emphasize woman’s oppression, it would seem only logical that they focus on the black female experience—but they did not. They chose to deny the existence of black women and to exclude them from the women’s movement. When I use the word “exclude” I do not mean that they overtly discriminated against black women on the basis of race. There are other ways to exclude and alienate people. Many black women felt excluded from the movement whenever they heard white women draw analogies between “women” and “blacks.” For by making such analogies white women were in effect saying to black women: “We don’t acknowledge your presence as women in American society.” Had white women desired to bond with black women on the basis of common oppression they could have done so by demonstrating any awareness or knowledge of the impact of sexism on the status of black women. Unfortunately, despite all the rhetoric about sisterhood and bonding, white women were not sincerely committed to bonding with black women and other groups of women to fight sexism. They were primarily interested in drawing attention to their lot as white upper and middle class women.

  It was not in the opportunistic interests of white middle and upper class participants in the women’s movement to draw attention to the plight of poor women, or the specific plight of black women. A white woman professor who wants the public to see her as victimized and oppressed because she is denied tenure is not about to evoke images of poor women working as domestics receiving less than the minimum wage struggling to raise a family single-handed. Instead it is far more likely she will receive attention and sympathy if she says, “I’m a nigger in the eyes of my white male colleagues.” She evokes the image of innocent, virtuous white womanhood being placed on the same level as blacks and most importantly on the same level as black men. It is not simply a coincidental detail that white women in the women’s movement chose to make their race-sex analogies by comparing their lot as white women to that of black men. In Catherine Stimpson’s essay on women’s liberation and black civil rights, in which she argues that “black liberation and women’s liberation must go their separate ways,” black civil rights is associated with black men and women’s liberation with white women. When she writes of the 19th century women’s rights movement, she quotes from the work of black male leaders even though black women were far more active in that movement than any black male leader.

  Given the psychohistory of American racism, for white women to demand more rights from white men and stress that without such rights they would be placed in a social position like that of black men, not like that of black people, was to evoke in the minds of racist white men an image of white womanhood being degraded. It was a subtle appeal to white men to protect the white female’s position on the race/sex hierarchy. Stimpson writes:

  White men, convinced of the holy primacy of sperm, yet guilty about using it, angry at the loss of the cosy sanctuary of the womb and the privilege of childhood, have made their sex a claim to power and then used their power to claim control of sex. In fact and fantasy, they have violently segregated black men and white women. The most notorious fantasy claims that the black man is sexually evil, low, subhuman; the white woman sexually pure elevated, superhuman. Together they dramatize the polarities of excrement and disembodied spirituality. Blacks and women have been sexual victims, often cruelly so: the black

  man castrated, the woman raped and often treated to a psychic clitoridectomy.

  For Stimpson, black is black male and woman is white female, and though she is depicting the white male as racist, she conjures an image of white women and black men sharing oppression only to argue that they must go their separate ways, and in so doing she makes use of the sex/race analogy in such a way as to curry favor from racist white men. Ironically, she admonishes white women not to make analogies between blacks and themselves but she continues to do just that in her essay. By suggesting that without rights they are placed in the same category as black men, white women appeal to the anti-black-male racism of white patriarchal men. Their argument for “women’s liberation” (which for them is synonymous with white women’s liberation) thus becomes an appeal to white men to maintain the racial hierarchy that grants white women a higher social status than black men.

  Whenever black women tried to express to white women their ideas about white female racism or their sense that the women who were at the forefront of the movement were not oppressed women they were told
that “oppression cannot be measured.” White female emphasis on “common oppression” in their appeals to black women to join the movement further alienated many black women. Because so many of the white women in the movement were employers of non-white and white domestics, their rhetoric of common oppression was experienced by black women as an assault, an expression of the bourgeois woman’s insensitivity and lack of concern for the lower class woman’s position in society.

  Underlying the assertion of common oppression was a patronizing attitude toward black women. White women were assuming that all they had to do was express a desire for sisterhood, or a desire to have black women join their groups, and black women would be overjoyed. They saw themselves as acting in a generous, open, non-racist manner and were shocked that black women responded to their overtures with anger and outrage. They could not see that their generosity was directed at themselves, that it was self-centered and motivated

  by their own opportunistic desires.

  Despite the reality that white upper and middle class women in America suffer from sexist discrimination and sexist abuse, they are not as a group as oppressed as poor white, or black, or yellow women. Their unwillingness to distinguish between various degrees of discrimination or oppression caused black women to see them as enemies. As many upper and middle class white feminists who suffer least from sexist oppression were attempting to focus all attention on themselves, it follows that they would not accept an analysis of woman’s lot in America which argued that not all women are equally oppressed because some women are able to use their class, race, and educational privilege to effectively resist sexist oppression.

  Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women’s movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women’s movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. This emphasis on work was yet another indication of the extent to which the white female liberationists’ perception of reality was totally narcissistic, classist, and racist. Implicit in the assertion that work was the key to women’s liberation was a refusal to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them to gain any measure of economic independence. In Liberating Feminism, Benjamin Barber’s critique of the women’s movement, he comments on the white middle and upper class women’s liberationist focus on work:

  Work clearly means something very different to women in search of an escape from leisure than it has to most of the human race for most of history. For a few lucky men, for far fewer women, work has occasionally been a source of meaning and creativity. But for most of the rest it remains even now forced drudgery in front of the ploughs, machines, words or numbers—pushing products, pushing switches, pushing papers to eke out the wherewithal of material existence.

  ...To be able to work and to have work are two different matters. I suspect, however, that few liberationist women are to be found working as menials and unskilled laborers simply in order to occupy their time and identify with the power structure. For status and power are not conferred by work per se, but by certain kinds of work generally reserved to the middle and upper classes.... As Studs Terkel shows in Working, most workers find jobs dull, oppressive, frustrating and alienating—very much what women find housewifery.

  When white women’s liberationists emphasized work as a path to liberation, they did not concentrate their attention on those women who are most exploited in the American labor force. Had they emphasized the plight of working class women, attention would have shifted away from the college-educated suburban housewife who wanted entrance into the middle and upper class work force. Had attention been focused on women who were already working and who were exploited as cheap surplus labor in American society, it would have de-romanticized the middle class white woman’s quest for “meaningful” employment. While it does not in any way diminish the importance of women resisting sexist oppression by entering the labor force, work has not been a liberating force for masses of American women. And for some time now, sexism has not prevented them from being in the work force. White middle and upper class women like those described in Betty Friedan’s The feminine Mystique were housewives not because sexism would have prevented them from being in the paid labor force, but because they had willingly embraced the notion that it was better to be a housewife than to be a worker. The racism and classism of white women’s liberationists was most apparent whenever they discussed work as the liberating force for women. In such discussions it was always the middie class “housewife” who was depicted as the victim of sexist oppression and not the poor black and non-black women who are most exploited by American economics.

  Throughout woman’s history as a paid laborer, white women workers have been able to enter the work force much later than black women yet advance at a much more rapid pace. Even though all women were denied access to many jobs because of sexist discrimination, racism ensured that the lot of the white women would always be better than that of the black female worker. Pauli Murray compared the status of the two groups in her essay “The Liberation of Black Women” and noted:

  When we compare the position of the black woman to that of the white woman, we find that she remains single more often, bears more children, is in the labor market longer and in greater proportion, has less education, earns less, is widowed earlier, and carries a relatively heavier economic responsibility as family head than her white counterpart.

  Often in discussions of woman’s status in the labor force, white women liberationists choose to ignore or minimize the disparity between the economic status of black women and that of white women. White activist Jo Freeman addresses the issue in The Politics of Women’s Liberation when she comments that black women have the “highest unemployment rates and lowest median income of any race/sex group.” But she then minimizes the impact of this assertion in a sentence that follows: “Of all race/sex groups of full-time workers, non-white women have had the greatest percentage increase in their median income since 1939, and white women have had the lowest.” Freeman does not inform readers that the wages black women received were not a reflection of an advancing economic status so much as they were an indication that the wages paid them, for so long considerably lower than those paid white women, were approaching the set norm.

  Few, if any, white women liberationists are willing to acknowledge that the women’s movement was consciously and deliberately structured to exclude black and other non-white women and to serve primarily the interests of middle and upper class college-educated white women seeking social equality with middle and upper class white men. While they may agree that white women involved with women’s liberationist groups are racist and classist they tend to feel that this in no way undermines the movement. But it is precisely the racism

  and classism of exponents of feminist ideology that has caused a large majority of black women to suspect their motives, and to reject active participation in any effort to organize a women’s movement. Black woman activist Dorothy Bolden, who worked forty-two years as a maid in Atlanta, one of the founders of the National Domestic Workers, Inc., voiced her opinions of the movement in Nobody Speaks for Me! Self Portraits of Working Class Women:

  ... I was very proud to see them stand up and speak up when it started. I’m glad to see any group do that when they’re righteous and I know they have been denied something. But they’re not talking about the masses of people. You’ve got different classes of people in all phases of life and all races, and those people have to be spoken up for too.

  ...You can’t talk about women’s rights until we include all women. When you deny one woman of her
rights, you deny all. I’m getting tired of going to those meetings, because there’s none of us participating.

  They’re still trying to put their amendment to the constitution, but they’re not going to be able to do it until they include us. Some of these states know this, that you don’t have all women up front supporting that amendment. They are talking about women’s rights but which women?

  It is often assumed that all black women are simply not interested in women’s liberation. White women’s liberationists have helped to perpetuate the belief that black women would rather remain in stereotypically female roles than have social equality with men. Yet a Louis Harris Virginia Slims poll conducted in 1972 revealed that sixty-two percent of black women supported efforts to change woman’s status in society as compared to forty-five percent of white women, and that sixty-seven percent of black women were sympathetic to women’s liberation groups compared with only thirty-five percent of white women. The findings of the Harris poll suggest it is not opposition to feminist ideology that has caused black women to reject involvement in the women’s movement.