How Do Barbara Smith and bell hooks Define Feminism? It's Not Just About Equality

The following is an excerpt from the new edition of A History of U.S. Feminisms by Rory C. Dicker (Seal Press, 2016): 

So much of what we take for granted in our everyday lives we owe to people who believed that women deserved to be treated equally in every area of their lives—in their homes and families, at work, before the law. Activists in the first wave of the women’s movement—the period extending from 1848, when the first women’s rights convention occurred, to 1920, when women gained suffrage—did more than secure the vote for women. Because of the work of first wavers, by the end of the nineteenth century, a woman could hold property in her own name, even after marriage; she could keep the money she earned if she worked for pay; and she could enter into contracts as well as sue people. By 1920, a woman could go to college and earn higher degrees; she could enter the professions; and she could live on her own without the “protection” of a husband or male guardian. These rights may seem pretty basic to us today, but they had to be fought for. Similarly, women in the second wave in the 1960s and ’70s agitated for and achieved many new rights for women, everything from greater access to employment and educational opportunities to reproductive rights, including abortion. Because of second wavers’ activism, a girl can play sports on school and community teams, a pregnant woman can choose to have a certified midwife rather than an obstetrician deliver her child, and a woman who has been sexually assaulted can call a rape crisis hotline. 

If women in the past have succeeded in making all of these gains, is there really any need for feminism today? Haven’t women achieved equality already? While American women certainly have more rights today than ever before, they still have a long way to go. For one thing, they are not paid equally: These days a woman can expect to earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Only twenty-three women are Fortune 500 CEOs; only 16.9 percent of the seats on corporate boards of directors are held by women. While there are more women involved in politics than ever, there are only twenty female U.S. senators (out of one hundred) and eighty-four female U.S. representatives (out of 435). Of the nine members of the Supreme Court, three are women, the largest number of women ever to serve at once. The social inequalities women face are as great as the economic and political ones. Women experience violence in their homes and families; they are subject to beauty ideals that encourage them to remake themselves through plastic surgery, skin bleaching, and disordered eating; and they have shrinking access to abortion, not to mention honest and thorough sex education. These continuing problems and inequalities suggest an ongoing need for feminist activism.

Feminism, however, is not just concerned with “equality.” Many people take issue with the standard dictionary definition of feminism because it tends to reinforce an androcentric understanding of equality: Women will become equal when they have what men have. Should women want merely to copy men, though? Aren’t there some flaws with the systems men have created? Indeed, aren’t these flaws what feminist activists are trying to redress? Some scholars and activists talk about feminism in very different ways, shifting the focus away from women’s trying to be like men and instead questioning whether women are even a unified category that can be understood to have the same interests and desires. In “Racism and Women’s Studies,” a talk delivered at the first National Women’s Studies Association conference in 1979, writer and activist Barbara Smith offered the following definition of feminism; it is one of two that I prefer: “Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, Jewish women, lesbians, old women—as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about Smith’s definition is its insistence that feminism is for “all women”; it is not a project or movement designed only for those with the privileges conferred by skin color, wealth, or sexual orientation. As Smith’s definition insists, women come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of concerns; to talk about “women” as one broad category is thus impossible, since a black woman, for example, cannot separate her race and her sex—these axes of her identity intersect and are always present in her lived experience. She can never be just a black person; she can never be just a woman, either. According to Smith, then, feminism cannot be concerned solely with the oppression women face as women; it must be concerned with oppressions based on sex, race, class, ability, age, and sexual orientation, among other things. For instance, feminists are concerned about poor women’s ability to find jobs and the social services they need; feminists work to assist lesbian mothers wanting to adopt children; and feminists question the ways the dominant culture depicts women of color in exotic, unrealistic, and demeaning ways.

Smith’s definition does not use the word “equality”; instead, Smith states that feminism aims to “free all women.” What might women need to be freed from? Smith’s reference to freedom echoes the demands of activists in the civil rights and black power movements, not to mention the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s; these radical feminists wanted to liberate women from the constraints and oppressions caused by patriarchy, a social system in which men rule and women are pushed into positions of inferiority and subservience. It is likely that for Smith, patriarchy was only one of many systems from which women needed liberation.

The definition of feminism offered by scholar bell hooks in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the second definition that I prefer, helps to clarify other things from which women might need to be freed. hooks writes: “Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

This definition suggests that women need to be freed from sexism, or discrimination based on the belief that one sex is superior to the other. But hooks expands her critique so that it is not based just on sex; to hooks, “domination” is the root of the problem, and domination occurs when one person or group has power over another. According to hooks, society needs to be transformed so that all systems of domination, including not just patriarchy but racism, imperialism, and capitalism, are eradicated. All of society would be free if the “ideology of domination” were eliminated; as a result, people would be able to concentrate on “self-development.” Feminism, then, can be thought of as a belief system that, by ending domination in all of its guises, liberates people so they can be their best selves. This liberation leads to social transformation. 

Excerpted from A History of U.S. Feminisms by Rory Dicker. Available from Seal Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright ©2016.