Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

In this chapter, hooks describes the history of the field of women’s studies as well as the need for feminist education beyond the academic classrooms of higher education. Thanks to feminist exposure of the absence of women in university curriculums, “much of this forgotten and ignored work” (20) by women writers of literature and academic scholarship like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered. This intervention carried enormous significance, as “women’s studies became the place where one could learn about gender, about women, from a non-biased perspective” (20). In hooks’s experience, this perspective did not invite conversation “where works of men were deemed unimportant or irrelevant” (20); instead “it was in that space that I received the encouragement to think critically […] about black female experience” (21).

As well, in these feminist classrooms, “black women and other women of color raised the issue of racial biases as a factor shaping feminist thought” (21). These discussions around privilege led feminist theory to change, but, problematically, “the feminist thinking that had emerged directly from theory and practice received less attention than theory that was metalinguistic, creating exclusive jargon” (22). The domination of academic language meant that feminism was now limited to “an elite group writing theory” (22), and soon “[a]cademic politics and careerism overshadowed feminist politics” (22).

hooks articulates the challenges inherent in academic feminism in this chapter, while emphasizing the importance of “a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism” (23). Without this movement towards the education of children, for example, “we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism” (23), which is a risky prospect for everybody.

Sexuality and women’s reproductive health, reproductive rights and the abortion debate are the focus of Chapter 5. In this chapter, hooks addresses the free love phenomenon, which “brought females face to face with the issue of unwanted pregnancy” (25). Women were able to choose “when and with whom they would be sexual” (25) thanks to free love, but without access to safe birth control and abortions, “gender equity” (25) did not exist.

The case of abortion specifically highlights “the class biases of the women at the forefront of the movement” (26). Though other reproductive issues like birth control were just as important as abortion and much more likely to have garnered support, “individual white women with class privilege identified most intimately with the pain of unwanted pregnancy” (26), which led them to shine the spotlight on abortion. hooks asserts that safe birth control was just as important as access to safe abortions, but, because “[i]t was easier for some females just to let things happen sexually then take care of the ‘problem’ later with abortions” (27), abortion became the focus. Unlike other reproductive issues, the issue of abortion drew media attention because “it challenged the fundamentalist thinking of Christianity…that a women’s reason for existence was to bear children” (27). hooks expresses surprise that abortion remains a political issue and sadness that women who need “state-funded, inexpensive, and when need be, free abortions” (28) are now targeted by the right-wing political front who support the Christian viewpoint.

The focus on abortion is problematic for several reasons, according to hooks, and one important reason has to do with the fact that abortions are relevant only to women of childbearing age: “Depending on a woman’s age and circumstance of life the aspect of reproductive rights that matters most will change” (29).