Contact
Privacy
Book: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Quotes of Book: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women
TOP TAGS :sleepingsalman-rushdielisten-to-your-heartburroughsmaritimebrennahurting-peoplealcoholism

  1. bell hooks _ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women

    The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.
    book-quote

  2. bell hooks _ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women

    When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong-and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.
    book-quote

  3. bell hooks _ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women

    Unfortunately, our over-emphasis on the male as oppressor often obscures the fact that men too are victimized. To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim. Patriarchy forces fathers to act as monsters, encourages husbands and lovers to be rapists in disguise; it teaches our blood brothers to feel ashamed that they care for us, and denies all men the emotional life that would act as a humanizing, self-affirming force in their lives.
    book-quote

  4. bell hooks _ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women

    It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
    book-quote

  5. bell hooks _ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women

    The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.
    book-quote
Categories