Author with Feminist Focus of Race and Gender

Her writings on gender and race helped push feminism beyond its White, middle-class worldview to include the voices of Black and working-class women

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name “bell hooks” (bh) – (her pen name used only lower-case letters – to emphasize, she often said, “The substance of books, not who I am.”) grew up in the ‘semirural’ South. Her father was a postal worker; her mother was a homemaker. 

CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER

The first career goal of bh, as a child, was to become an architect. While comfortable with math, bh was also an avid reader, often to the annoyance of her sisters, who frequently complained to their parents that “every night we would try to sleep, but the sounds of bh writing or page turning caused us to yell down to Mom to make her turn the light off!”

EDUCATION

The first elementary schools attended by bh were segregated according to race: schools for Black students like bh and separate schools for White students. Within a few years of when bh started school, Federal law (a famous U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education), declared that ‘Separate is not equal” so schools in every state must be racially integrated. 

Editor’s note – Many adult residents of the South continued to disagree with court-ordered, school integration. That opposition was understood by many of the Black children, including bh, who later drew on this experience in her memoir, “Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.”

While still a college undergraduate, bh began writing “Ain’t I A Woman” – its title was borrowed from a speech by the Black abolitionist Sojourner Truth. bh graduated from the university with a degree in English literature. Later, she earned a Master’s degree in English from a different university and a Doctorate in literature from a third university. 

FIRST ADULT JOB – TEACHING

While being paid to teach literature at the college / university level, bh had time after teaching and mentoring students, to continue her passion for writing. Eventually, she began to earn money from devoting considerable off-duty time to writing. Her first book was a collection of poems, “And There We Wept” published while she was still teaching. 

FEMINIST AUTHOR’S FOCUS WAS ON GENDER AND RACE

In the opinion of bh, feminism’s claim to speak for all women had pushed the unique experiences of working-class and Black women to the margins. Said a law professor at an Ivy League university: “I think of bh as being pivotal to an entire generation of Black feminists who saw that for the first time, they had license to call themselves Black feminists. She was utterly courageous in terms of putting on paper thoughts many of us might have had in private.”

Said bh: “Womanhood could not be reduced to a singular experience but had to be considered within a framework encompassing race and class. She called for a new form of feminism, one that recognized differences and inequalities among women as a way of creating a new, more inclusive movement.”

bh applied a similar criticism to Black antiracism, which she said was often grounded in a patriarchal worldview that excluded the experiences of Black women. Her books, written in a flowing, jargon-free style, were required reading across a wide range of college courses. 

Part of bh’s appeal was the sheer diversity of her interests. Her written works, across 30 books, encompassed literary criticism, children’s fiction, self-help, memoir and poetry and it tackled not just subjects like education, capitalism and American history but also love and friendship. 

As a teacher, bh instructed her students to see critical thinking and reading as liberating activities. Said a fellow author who had taken courses taught by bh: “She was a foundational influence on how I understood the possibility of my becoming a writer. She taught me how to read. But more than that, she taught me how to read as a global person.”

CAREER SATISFACTION

In addition to receiving wide, critical acclaim for her writing with passion and informed perspective on so many diverse topics, bh emphasized the importance of community and of healing as the end goal of movements like feminism and antiracism. She spoke often of her friendship with a Buddhist monk and insisted that love was the only way to overcome what she called the “imperialist white supremacy capitalist patriarchy. I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love and the only way to really be able to connect with others and to know how to be, is to participate in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.”

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This career story was based on an obituary written by Clay Risen, published by The New York Times newspaper on 12/15/21.