bell hooks (born September 25, 1952) is a U.S. Black feminist thinker and social critic best known for recognizing and seeking to change thinking that supports and perpetuates what she terms "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" into movements that will bring about a more uplifting and affirming society.

Born Gloria Watkins, she uses the name bell hooks, spelled without capital letters, to honor her mother and her grandmother. In 1973, she graduated Stanford University in 1976, following that with a degree from University of Wisconsin and with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

hooks believes, among other things, that many of the issues that confront society today (such as race, gender, sex, class, and sexual orientation) are inextricably interconnected; and that these issues must be confronted as a whole in order to bring about positive social change.

Monographs by hooks include:

  • Ain't I a Woman: Black women and feminism (1981) ISBN 089608129X
  • Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984)
  • Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black (1989)
  • Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (1990)
  • Breaking Bread: insurgent Black intellectual life (1991) (with Cornel West)
  • Black Looks: race and representation (1992)
  • Sisters of the Yam: black women and self-recovery (1993)
  • Teaching to Transgress: education as the practice of freedom (1994)
  • Outlaw Culture: resisting representations (1994)
  • Art on My Mind: visual politics (1995)
  • Killing Rage: ending racism (1995)
  • Bone Black: memories of girlhood (1996)
  • Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996)
  • Wounds of Passion: a writing life (1997)
  • Happy to be Nappy (1999) (a children's book, with Christopher Raschka)
  • Remembered Rapture: the writer at work (1999)

Ain't I a Woman

In Ain't I a Woman hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the seventies. She argues that the convergance of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever black women spoke. Hooks points out that these white female reformers where more concerned with white morality than the conditions these morals caused black americans.

Further, she argues that the stereotypes that were set during slavery still affect black women today. She argues that slaverly allowed white society to stereotype white women as the pure goddess virgin and move black women to the seductive whore stereotype formerly placed on all women. This has allowed the justification of the devaluation of black feminity and rape which continues to this day. The work which black women have been forced to perform, either in slavery or in a discriminatory work place, that would be non-gender conforming for white women has been used against black women as a proof of their emasculating behaviour. Since black nationalism was largely a patriarchical misogynist movement that sought to overcome racial divisions by strengthening sexist ones, it readily latched onto the idea of the emasculating black matriarch proposed by Daniel Moynihan and repeatedly critisized by hooks.

Meanwhile, the "feminist movement", a largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism. She says this explains the low numbers of black women who participated in the feminist movement in the seventies, especially since a Louis Harris Virginia Slims poll done in 1972 show 62 percent of black women supported efforts to change women's status and 67 percent sympathized with the women's rights movement, compared with 45 and 35 percent of white women.

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