Communion: The Female Search for Love

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and sexual violence and harassment.

In Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks conducts historical analysis of the stages of the feminist movement and its conception of love. The women’s rights movement in the United States began in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow women’s rights activists organized the Seneca Convention and drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, written in the style of the Declaration of Independence, which supports full civil liberties for women, including the right to vote. Stanton and her fellow activists began a 72-year campaign for women’s suffrage, with the US government finally giving women the right to vote in 1920. After suffrage was won, women’s rights activists campaigned for the right to control their own bodies.

hooks references second-wave feminism, which coincides with her college experience in the 1960s. Second-wave feminism began in the 1960s, and many scholars agree it began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 text The Feminine Mystique, which examined women’s despair with societal expectations surrounding marriage and childbearing, criticizing the postwar belief that women’s roles were solely wives and mothers. The text made feminism more accessible to more women. The second wave continued the campaign for access to contraceptives, the right to abortion, and the right to equal pay. The second wave often intersected with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.

hooks also engages with third-wave feminism, which began in 1991 with the Anita Hill Trial, in which Hill accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual misconduct. Women saw how Hill was mistreated, denigrated, and humiliated for seeking justice, which inspired women around the country to speak out about their experiences with sexual harassment and abuse. The third wave sought to stop violence against women and promote sexual liberation, which hooks discusses in Chapter 3, “Looking for Love, Finding Freedom.” As intersectionality became more culturally prevalent, third-wave feminists attempted to make the movement more inclusive.

Both the second and third-wave feminist movements contributed to what hooks identifies as a prioritization of power over love. Women sought to cultivate their own power and freedom while challenging patriarchy, but, as hooks illustrates, these attempts at obtaining power often came at the expense of emotional vulnerability and self-love. Women believed that to find success in the patriarchy, they needed to ascribe to societally normalized emotional expression, which meant emotional repression, as many men believed strong emotions were a sign of weakness.

The fourth wave, which began in the 2010s, seeks to combat sexual violence, abuse, harassment, and objectification. The fourth wave rose to prominence during 2017’s #MeToo movement, which inspired women to speak collectively about their experiences with sexual harassment, abuse, and violence. #MeToo highlights collective speech and women putting their voices together to achieve a common goal. Like hooks’s use of the collective term “we” to describe women throughout Communion, the fourth wave seeks a collective communion to free women from inequality. As feminism continues to develop, hooks’s teachings about love remain relevant: Feminists must remember the power and importance of love.