This chapter is a quick history of the feminist movement and a clarification of what it addresses.
Bell Hooks reiterates that she prefers her definition of feminism as:
a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
She likes that it does
This chapter is a quick history of the feminist movement and a clarification of what it addresses.
Bell Hooks reiterates that she prefers her definition of feminism as:
a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
She likes that it does not imply that men are the enemy. It highlights that feminism aims to root out sexist thinking and acting “whether those who perpetrate it are female or male, child or adult.”
Next she points out how most people learn about feminism through patriarchal mass media and as a result only see part of the story. Most people, she explains, see feminism as concerned primarily with gender equality – women seeking to be equal to men – and that many of those people believe feminism is anti-male. They know through the media that feminism “focuses on the freedom to have abortions, to be lesbians, to challenge rape and domestic violence.” And this is definitely the feminism I knew about in high school and university.
She explains that among early feminist activists there was actually quite a bit of “anti-male sentiment,” since they were responding to the oppression they experienced with anger. She points out that most of the early feminist activists had “had their consciousness raised” through working in other activist circles fighting for freedom for their class, race, or people when they realized that their male allies sought to ensure that males would continued to lead.
Just a note, consciousness raising (as far as I’m aware) is a Marxist idea that describes that most oppressed people (in Marx’s case the working class) don’t recognize that they are oppressed, taking the current state of affairs and their lack of power as natural and unchanging until something makes them aware of the oppression and the possibility of fighting it.
So Hooks says that through fighting for liberation in other contexts, many women saw the need and the chance to fight for liberation from sexist rules and norms. So this sugg