"Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression."

- bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

​

bell hooks is an African American author, teacher, academic and social activist. In a career spanning four decades, she has explored and written on a variety of themes including racism, feminism, culture and education. Her work has centred on identifying and challenging systems of oppression and discrimination which are based on race, sex and class. She is widely regarded as one of the most important intellectuals and writers of her generation.

 

She was born in 1952 into a working class family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Christened Gloria Watkins, she would later adopt the pen name “bell hooks” after her maternal great-grandmother and in acknowledgment of her female ancestry. She chose to use lower case letters for this name in order to remove the focus from her as a person and place it solely on her writing.

​

A prolific writing career began in 1978 with the publication of a chapbook of poems called And There We Wept. However, bell’s first major work, the groundbreaking Ain’t I Woman?: Black Women & Feminism, was published in 1981. It was a hugely influential book and remains a vital text in feminist literature. In the book, bell explored feminism and the civil rights movement, arguing that the divergence of racism and sexism which began with slavery made black women the most oppressed and marginalised group in American society. She described Black Nationalism as a patriarchal and misogynistic movement which sought to replace racial divisions by reinforcing sexist ones and feminism as largely white and middle class, wholly divorced from the needs of non-white and poor women.

​

Biography courtesy of The Heroine Collective