bell hooks on the Devaluation of Black Womanhood

In her first book, started when she was 19, bell hooks argued that the way America saw Black women was fixed under slavery and never reset. Where those images came from, what she said about them, and what researchers found decades later.
By Teona Abuladze · 8 min read

While she was working on her first book, a young writer from Kentucky interviewed a Black woman who worked as a clerk. The woman lived close to poverty. She kept coming back to one idea: the Black woman was matriarchal, powerful, in control of her life.
The writer was Gloria Jean Watkins, who published as bell hooks. More than twenty years later she described that interview again. The woman, she wrote, had been on the edge of a nervous breakdown, struggling every day just to make ends meet.
The strong woman in the story and the exhausted woman telling it. hooks spent a good part of her career on the distance between them.
A book started at 19
hooks began writing Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at 19, as an undergraduate at Stanford. It took years to get published. South End Press brought it out in 1981.
The book has five chapters. The second is called “Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood,” and its central claim followed her for the rest of her life. The devaluation of Black women, she wrote, came out of their sexual exploitation under slavery, and it “has not altered in the course of hundreds of years.”
In 1992 Publishers Weekly named the book one of the twenty most influential women’s books of the previous twenty years. In 2019 the novelist Min Jin Lee, who had studied with hooks at Yale, wrote in The New York Times that it was still radical and relevant political theory.
The title came from Sojourner Truth. We’ll get back to that, because the title has a problem of its own.
One womanhood, split in two
Her argument runs roughly like this. Slavery let white society divide womanhood into two roles. White women became the pure, protected ones. Black women were handed the role of the seductive, available woman, a stereotype that had once been applied to women in general. Once that was settled, the rape of Black women could be explained away.
She went further. Enslaved women did field labor that would have been called unwomanly for a white woman. After emancipation, the same kind of work, in fields and kitchens and other people’s houses, was held up as proof that Black women were hard and unfeminine.
The work Black women were forced to do became the evidence against them.
You can hold these ideas in your hand
At Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, the sociologist David Pilgrim turned his private collection of racist objects into the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. When it opened in its full space in 2012, it held more than 9,000 artifacts.
More than 100 of them carry the mammy image: ashtrays, postcards, fishing lures, detergent, toys, candles, kitchenware. Mammy is the loyal, smiling servant who seems to love the white family more than her own. The scholar Carolyn M. West has pointed out how little historical evidence there is for such a woman. Enslaved women were beaten, overworked and raped. They ran away, fought back when punished, helped others escape, and in some cases poisoned the people who owned them.
Next to Mammy in the collection is Jezebel. The museum describes her as the image of Black women as promiscuous by nature, even predatory, set against white women as models of modesty and sexual purity. It is the split hooks described, sold as souvenirs.
A third figure, Sapphire, is the loud, angry Black woman. West and other scholars trace all three back to slavery.
The matriarch
The stereotype hooks pushed against hardest was the one that sounds like praise.
In March 1965 the U.S. Department of Labor produced an internal report called The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Its author was an assistant secretary, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He described Black family life as caught in a “tangle of pathology,” and he put what he called matriarchy, homes headed by women, near the center of it.
The report leaked, set off a national fight, and was effectively dead as policy by November 1965. The image of the domineering Black mother outlived it by decades.
In Ain’t I a Woman hooks argued that much of the Black nationalist movement was patriarchal, and that it readily took up Moynihan’s emasculating matriarch. Black women got blamed from two directions at once.
What worried her most was that many Black women believed the myth about themselves. The clerk was one of them. In her later reflection hooks wrote that women who accepted the strong-matriarch story were less likely to organize together against the racism and sexism actually pressing on them.
Black women who believe the myth come to “imagine that we have power we don’t really possess.” — bell hooks
Feminism wasn’t listening either
hooks didn’t spare feminists. As she saw it, the movement of the 1970s was mostly white and middle class, and it left out the needs of poor women and women of color.
She followed the pattern back to the nineteenth century. White women abolitionists and suffragists were often more at ease working alongside Black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. When Black women spoke in public, the stereotype of Black female immorality was used to stir up protest against them.
A 1995 profile in Times Higher Education summed up the trap she described. “Blacks” usually meant Black men. “Women” usually meant white women. Black women fell somewhere in between.
Her own definition of feminism became one of her most quoted lines: “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” It says nothing about which women. That was the point.
The line Sojourner Truth probably never said
On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth spoke at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Marius Robinson, a journalist and a friend of hers, printed the speech in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on June 21, 1851. The two reportedly went over his transcription together before it ran. It begins:
“I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.”
The phrase “Ain’t I a woman?” isn’t in it.
That version comes from Frances Dana Gage, who had presided over the convention. She published her account in the New York Independent in April 1863, twelve years later. Gage wrote Truth’s words in a Southern slave dialect, though Truth had been enslaved in New York. She also had Truth say she had borne thirteen children and seen most of them sold. Scholars generally think Truth had five children, and one was sold.
So the best-known sentence about Black womanhood in American history was most likely put into a Black woman’s mouth by a white woman, in an accent that wasn’t hers. hooks’s book is about Black women being described by other people. Its own title is an example.
What researchers found in 2017
In 2017, Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality surveyed 325 adults of different races, ethnicities and education levels from across the United States. Each answered one of two questionnaires, one about Black girls, the other about white girls.
The adults saw Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age, especially between 5 and 14. The bias showed up from age 5. The researchers had built their scale partly from items tied to stereotypes of Black women and girls.
“Adults see black girls as less innocent and less in need of protection,” said the lead author, Rebecca Epstein. The report is called Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Its authors suggest this “adultification” may help explain why Black girls are disciplined more often and more harshly than white girls, in schools and in the juvenile justice system.
In 1981 hooks called the devaluation continuing. The adults in the Georgetown survey were describing five-year-olds.
Where it gets complicated
Ain’t I a Woman has no footnotes. That 1995 profile called it a controversial polemic, and it is one. A young writer made broad historical claims, among them that the combination of racism and sexism under slavery left Black women with the lowest status of any group in American society. Admirers read the missing footnotes as a deliberate refusal of academic gatekeeping. Skeptics read the same absence as a weakness. Both readings are still around.
Moynihan has defenders too. The historian Stephanie Coontz notes that he built on a long line of Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Clark, and that he condemned what he called America’s “racist virus.” Clark himself defended the report when it was attacked. Its supporters argue that Moynihan named racism and economic injustice as the causes, and that critics went after one word and ignored the rest. hooks read the report for what it did to Black women’s reputation. They read it for what its author meant. The two readings don’t fully cancel each other out.
The book is still in print. Routledge issued a second edition in 2015 with the same five chapters, the second one still titled “Continued.”

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
If you or someone close to you has experienced sexual violence, RAINN runs a free, confidential hotline at 1-800-656-4673.
Sources: bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981; Routledge, 2015), table of contents via Routledge; bell hooks, later reflection on the chapter, via Taylor & Francis; The New York Times, “bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69” (December 15, 2021); Britannica, “bell hooks”; Colorado State University English Department on the Publishers Weekly ranking; Times Higher Education, “A class sister act” (October 13, 1995); Georgia Public Broadcasting on hooks and footnotes; Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, Mammy and Jezebel galleries; Michigan Public and Black America Web on the museum’s 2012 opening; Baptist News Global on the Mammy, Sapphire and Jezebel stereotypes, citing Carolyn M. West; Dissent, “The Moynihan Report Resurrected”; Stephanie Coontz, “The Moynihan Family Circus”; History News Network on the Moynihan Report; National Park Service, Women’s Rights National Historical Park, on Sojourner Truth; The Sojourner Truth Project and Sojourner Truth Memorial, comparison of the Robinson and Gage texts; Mental Floss on the Gage version; Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, Girlhood Interrupted (June 27, 2017), press release and summary.