Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

The first full-length book by the American writer and teacher bell hooks, the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, published in 1981. Its title echoes the question attributed to Sojourner Truth in her 1851 speech for women's rights. hooks argues that Black women have been made invisible: when people speak of Black people they usually mean Black men, and when they speak of women they usually mean white women. The first chapter shows how slavery exposed Black women to both racist and sexist violence, and the next traces how the devaluation of Black womanhood continued after slavery through stereotypes and sexual exploitation. She then examines patriarchy among Black men and in the Black movements of the 1960s, and the racism of the white women's movement from the suffrage campaign onward. The final chapter recovers a tradition of Black women's feminism and calls for a feminism that confronts racism, sexism and class together.

It is an accessible founding text of intersectional feminism, showing why race, sex and class cannot be analysed separately.