The history of black feminism movement

Black Women who participated in the feminist movement during the 1960s often met with racism. It generally took the form of exclusion: black women were not invited to participate on conference panels which were not specifically about black or Third World women. They were not equally, or even proportionately, represented on the faculty of Women's Studies Departments, nor were there classes devoted specifically to the study of black women's history. In most women's movement writings, the experiences of white, middle class women were described as universal "women's experiences, " largely ignoring the differences of black and white women's experiences due to race and class. In addition to this, well-known black women were often treated as tokens; their work was accepted as representing "the" black experience and was rarely ever criticized or challenged. Sojourner Truth delivered a forceful speech, ‘ain't I a Woman?’ in the Women's convention held in Ohio in 1851, underscoring her ‘difference’ as an ex-slave black woman and contradicting the model of gender in which Euro-American women were both incarcerated and nurtured: The movement, though ostensibly for the liberation of the black race, was in word and deed for the liberation of the black male. Race was extremely sexualized in the rhetoric of the movement. In Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, hooks is forceful in her condemnation of racism, classism, and sexism, while analysing popular culture and consumerism. Freedom was equated with manhood and the freedom of blacks with the redemption of black masculinity.