How to Welcome Everyone to Feminism

bell hooks' Feminist Theory; trad wives, Black women, and lesbian feminists

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

― bell hooks

“The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”

― Angela Y. Davis

unknown literary canon is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to preserving and archiving lesser known literary works, and especially, feminist thought and lesbian literature, poetry, art, and history. if you would like to support this project, please like, share, comment, and if you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Any and all form of support are deeply appreciated!

trad wives

A generation ago, Ree Drummond was working in L.A. and met her rancher husband by chance. Her husband, by the way, was an heir to one of Oklahoma’s wealthiest families. Instead of going back to law school (or so the story goes), Ree fell in love, settled down on her husband’s ranch, gave birth to several children, “accidentally” started an immensely successful blog that spiraled into other businesses and a television show.

Her story has a lot of similarities to a woman named Hannah who goes by Ballerina Farm online. Ballerina Farm also met a wealthy dude by chance (well, the story goes that he forced their meeting), settled down on a farm, and had even more children than Ree Drummond. She goes by Ballerina Farm because she originally wanted to be a ballerina, but got married instead.

Both the beautiful farm wife and mother and a ballerina are in line with a sort of hyper femininity. It doesn’t seem that very far-fetched to me that a women who grew up very religious would happily give up a career dancing for another career - wife, mother. Like Ree, Ballerina Farm also built multiple successful businesses off of her social media empire.

The thing is: the latter incarnation, Ballerina Farm, is viewed in entirely different ways. As if there’s something sinister about a woman choosing to marry a wealthy man and be a wife and mother over pursuing a career as a ballerina, that she needs to be “rescued”. As if she was manipulated into making that choice through a society that enforces strong gender roles. Perhaps, but she’s made the choice herself, and it’s not what it appears to be.

Let’s be a little more honest about the situation: it’s capitalism. She’s the CEO of a business empire. Her image of a trad wife is marketing. Selling a fantasy that’s blurs into reality is great marketing, if you think about it.

When many other housewives give up careers, there’s the chance of being left with very little if the husband wants a divorce. There are laws around this: if a husband leaves a wife after she’s forty or so and she’s cared for their shared home and children, she’s more likely to get more alimony because she’s given her most marriageable, marketable years to him¹.

Neither Ree Drummond nor Ballerina Farm are in that situation: they’ve married men with generational wealth, but they’ve both found enormous success in their own businesses, which sell the vision of a woman who centers her life around food, home, farm, husband, and children. That, perhaps, is where their flaw lies: they’re working women selling the image of dependency on men when they both have greater financial independence.

Betty Friedan, lean-in feminism, the beneficiaries of dei

Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are the most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority².

So begins bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Throughout this book, bell hooks told us why feminism focused on only certain types of women, and why we should broaden who feminism is for and who stands to benefit from it. I started this essay by speaking to perceptions and arguments about privileged trad wives, because, frankly, I don’t think they should be the battleground for feminism that they’ve become. Because, despite what the latter claims (a new feminist vision), they’re deeply individualistic and complicit with the capitalistic, patriarchal that rewarded them.

Back to Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I absolutely loved it. It’s one of those that was life changing for me, in that it captured so concisely the ideas that float around my thoughts, and a lot of my own experiences and hesitations around calling myself myself a feminist. hooks advocates for a simple idea: that feminism should be is a global movement, with a common language, for all of us.

In particular, hooks returned to the feminism of Betty Friedan, which was really the older version of the feminism of Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead fame. Hooks told us Friedan’s feminism addressed “the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life.³”

For the purposes of this article, when I refer to “white women” isn’t a precise reference to skin color, but rather the definition that bell hooks used in her Feminist Theory, and the definition that’s used by a lot of liberals and leftists. It’s the particular group of middle- and upper-class women who are often but not exclusivity white, and who, like the trad wives, or like Joan Didion and Alice Munro, are/were complicit in the patriarchal, capitalistic norms that personally benefits/benefitted them. The trad wife movement upholds this. Sometimes that means finding fulfillment in what Friedan and her ilk fought against. Sometimes it’s the “girlboss” feminism that still does not nothing to uplift womankind as whole, but allows the individual to benefit and serve as model of a sort of feminism that still serves the patriarchy. They’re not wrong in wanting it for themselves; they’re only wrong when they advocate that all women should help them strive for this because it’s not for all of us.

The answer to “the problem that has no name”, to helping these woman Friedan believed, was that women should be able to work outside the home, thus ensuring greater freedom. Friedan and others considered the oppression of all women equal, no matter economic circumstance or class (as Leah Fritz argued), that it was the freedom to “decide her own destiny, freedom from x-role, freedom…”. It was a near-apolitical vision, it “evokes a very romantic notion of personal freedom that is more acceptable than a definition that emphasizes radical political action.⁴”

In the end, many of those women went out into the workplace in the 1970s and early 1980s not because of the feminist movement, but because of the growing cost of living. There was an increasing need for both parents in a two-parent household to have incomes. Sandberg came along decades later. She extended that apolitical, romantic notion of personal freedom by espousing the idea that (certain) women could have it all: a home and family life, and all they needed to do was speak up more, ask men to help, and take on even better jobs and more leadership. hooks described the problem with Sandberg’s and Friedan’s brand of feminism long before Sandberg wrote the book: that the liberal women used their brand of feminism for their personal, material benefit. Once the benefit was achieved, they could abandon the movement, and the other women who hadn’t benefited.

What Friedan’s movement failed to see what was that poor and working class women were already working outside the home, and had been for decades. There were women taking in laundry and running boarding homes, seamstresses dying en masse in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire⁵, women working as secretaries and switchboard operators…you get the picture. In Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis wrote that the majority of Black women were employed as domestic labor, as soon as chattel-based slavery ended⁶. The thing was that Friedan and her fellow feminists of all of the waves weren’t talking about the type of low-paying “menial” labor that those women were already doing⁷.

Let’s go back to that Angela Y Davis quote at the beginning of this essay. A person’s first obligation to themselves is make sure they don’t starve, that is, that they have the financial means to meet their most basic necessities. If they don’t or if a movement works against that interest, they’re not going to be interested. They might even be opposed to it. According to hooks, Black women were afraid of increased financial precariousness if middle- and upper-class white women took the jobs that their family depended on. And both black women and men were afraid that because of white supremacy, they’d be out of work, that the jobs they could once get would be given to white women instead of them.

They were not wrong. Today, for all the conservative uproar that DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) has unfairly benefited Black people and people of color, studies show that the reality is that DEI overwhelmingly benefited white women⁸.

bell hooks’ personal experiences with racism; her expansive definition of feminism

Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956. bell hooks was born in 1952, and lived through desegregation in her home state, Kentucky; I share this image because intersectionality.

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks frequently touched upon the ways in which middle- and upper-class white liberal feminists excluded others from the movement. As part of that, she told the type of infuriating personal stories that we’ve all heard unless we’re purposely choosing to stay in ignorance of the realities of racism. First, in a woman’s studies class, when she

I stated that when the child of two black parents was coming out of the womb, the factor that is considered first is skin color, then gender, because race and gender will determine that child’s fate⁹.

The rest of the class became upset with her, reverting back to the safety of their primacy of their belief that gender is the strongest factor in determining fate.

And later, in a PhD-level class, when hooks commented that there was no material by “[B]lack, Native American Indian, Hispanic, or Asian women”, that the “white hostility and anger toward her was so intense that she found it difficult to go to class. Although hooks was the subject to anger merely for voicing a truth, that incident lead to a rumor about her “wiping out” people (being overly dominant)¹⁰.

To speak of uncomfortable truths led to the label of being difficult, and I’m glad that hooks did not allow those experiences to hamper her from continuing to do the valuable work she did. And in feminist groups:

When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude toward me and other non-white participants…the movement was theirs, but they needed us to legitimize the process¹¹.

For me, as a woman of color in the U.S…hooks’ experiences, though decades earlier, sounded achingly familiar. I say “aching” because it’s painful to think that decades later, this is still happening. I remember the time I spoke up in a law school class about “poor people” depending each other (and therefore, having stronger communal bonds). How the rest of the class became very condescending about it because they’d never been in that place, and expected they never would. I remember being in kindergarten and first grade, and getting kicked out of the playground where the white kids at school when the white kids were allowed to play and run around. And dozens of similar incidents peppering a lifetime.

Those aggressions and exclusions are true of liberal and progressive groups in my experience, too. About a year ago, I told a group of white #metoo activists (both men and women) about my experiences as a woman of color, and of other people of color in their activist circles (of being ignored when we spoke, or belittled)…only to have them tell me that we should form our own circles and groups if they excluded us, that I was expecting too much to ask white people to include people of color, that they had the freedom to include and exclude as they wanted. I sometimes still feel a bit of a sting when I remember a woman in so-called leftist group¹² telling that I “wasn’t worth the trouble” because there were white men that had already proved their worth before I showed up. I’m not saying she said this figuratively, I mean it quite literally.

This attitude of exclusion, of forming personal movements and small in-groups is one of the core problems of the feminist movement. hooks was writing about second wave feminism, but her thoughts apply to third wave feminism too: that it was too individualistic, that it was too much about identity. Instead of saying “I am a feminist”, it would be better to say “I advocate for feminism”¹³. And instead of making it about personal benefit and freedom, hooks’ definitions of feminism were:

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 desire¹⁴.

and

Feminist is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all of our lives¹⁵.

What I love about both of these definitions how concisely they capture so many disparate strands: overcoming personal financial and material benefit, addressing imperialism to include non-Western women, indeed, non-Western people, clarifying that it does not pertain to any one class or race.

what the lesbian feminists got wrong

After assuming a ‘feminist’ identity, women often seek to live the ‘feminist’ lifestyle. These women do not see that it undermines feminist movements to project the assumption that ‘feminism’ is but another pre-packaged role women can now select as they search for identity¹⁶.

The problem with feminism as an identity is that there were and are a lot of women who do not want that “alternative” or “radical” identity. Women already found their themselves important, women who did not and do not want to abandon their lives or identities to assume a “feminist” one. Too many thought it meant something it didn’t, or were uncertain of its meaning. hook wrote that if you detailed all the tenets of feminism to a woman, she might agree with them but still hesitate. The movement seemed too radical, today, too tied to leftism, or too far gone or not enough. For other, the conservative woman that Andrea Dworkin wrote about, it went contrary to their self-interest, which was to seek protection from men. For the non-white women, it seemed like a movement that was to benefit only white women. Even for the college-educated, middle class woman of today, feminists like Moira Donegan and Amia Srinivasan, have written of its perception of being “deeply unsexy”.

bell hook doesn’t get into this, but part of the turn against feminism, for many woman, was likely the anti-sex elements. There was the failed anti-porn movement and Messe Commission, with Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. As much as I loved Dworkin’s Right Wing Women, I found the anti-porn parts of her 1974 Women Hating more questionable. She wrote two lengthy chapters on BDSM porn (Jean de Borg’s The Image and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O) in such graphic, needless detail that I might as well have been reading the erotica itself. Dworkin wrote at length of the oppression of heterosexuality, and the ways in which women were reduced through sexuality, but she, as Moira Donegan mentioned in the forward to Right Wing Women, failed to acknowledge the joy of sexuality, the inspiration and creativity that can come from sexuality not based in inequality.

hooks¹⁷ mentions that many women equated feminism with lesbianism in her era. She also gently takes lesbians to task, for being “middle class”. Are we? I never had that the impression that lesbians are by-and-large middle class, especially as the whole butch/masc identity was tied to lesbian taking working class/manual labor jobs. hooks also wrote of “lack of responsibilities”, eg, not wives of men, not mothers. I think sometimes people romanticize lesbianism, that it’s an escape from daily sexism into a softer, gentle women of women, one where there are fewer responsibilities. Maybe, in some ways. But in many ways, it’s not so. Of course, there are lesbians who are mothers, and lesbians who have to care for aging parents. As Adrienne Rich described in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, being a lesbian mother means living in fear of loss of access to your children. As Constance Debré showed in Love Me Tender, that loss is very real for many lesbians, especially if they had children with men who they divorced after discovering their lesbianism. Lesbians face the sexism, misogyny, and added prejudices in the workplace. We live with the added fear of losing the right to be a wife, and of homophobia.

Another way in which I think the second-wave lesbian feminist movement scared off women was the idea of political lesbianism. The Furies, a radical lesbian group from 1971 wrote “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.¹⁸” Ti-Grace Atkinson (who signed on a letter expressing “alarm” about opposition to “currently fashion[able]” views on gender) famously said “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” In Sheila Jeffreys (who wrote a book - Gender Hurts - advocating about pronouns corresponding to biological sex, that reassignment surgery was “patriarchal control”, and other views) and other members of radical feminist Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group wrote “We do think ... that all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.¹⁹” Julie Bindel (who has written highly questionable articles about trans women) argued that she is a “political lesbian”.

The majority of women are heterosexual, and the majority of queer women are bisexual (or pansexual, but data says “bisexual”), not lesbian. This idea of forcing a sexuality, or choosing celibacy - well, no wonder the movement lost steam and no wonder that women didn’t want to join en masse. Their ideas of enforcing norms of sexuality and gender would of course be exclusionary to women who might otherwise agree to hooks’ definitions of feminism, thus leading to those women feeling excluded from the movement altogether.

Political lesbianism is undesirable to me. I write that as a lesbian. Because it has little to with desiring women, but simply - I think rather offensively - frames lesbianism as the desire to get away from men, and thus, heterosexuality. I mean, I wouldn’t have sex with a “political lesbian”, because I want to desire and be desired, in near-equal measure. That is one of the loveliest parts of lesbianism. Political lesbianism reduces the lesbian experience, with all its beauty, intensity, and joy, to the ugly negation of men.

And did you notice something else when you read the descriptions of all those radical feminists that advocated for no sex unless it’s women-loving-women sex? That today, they are opposed to the inclusion of trans women in their movement. It’s not surprising. In regards to both, they’re operating under the idea of sexuality and gender are fully controllable, and thus pushing their moral vision of that onto the general public²⁰.

Bringing Men into the Feminist Movement

One of the quotes in the section above, from the Leeds Revolutionary Working Group, about feminists that do “not fuck men” is from a pamphlet called “Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism”.

That title is telling, that these women thought men, not the patriarchy, not the system in which individual men were raised, were their enemies. bell hooks wrote that these feminists espoused the theory that men were “the evil” from which other evils (capitalism, class, race) stemmed. Which of those is the original sin is near-impossible to say, in my opinion. To guilt and shame individuals into change seems counterintuitive, to say the least. That attitude, of making men the enemy, was and is exclusionary for both men and women - for women who love men (romantically, as friends, as family, as colleagues…).

Something I’ve noticed in my reading: feminists of color were far less likely to perceive men as the enemy than white feminists were (something I’ve written about in this essay, Why So Many Feminists Believe the Myth of the Dangerous Black Man). This makes sense, as middle- and upper-class white feminists were, so to speak, secondary to middle- and upper-class white men, with only their gender as oppression. Feminists of color are more likely to include men in their fight, because they share some fights against oppression. Feminists of color feel the oppression of gender, but that of race and/or ethnicity as well. Our lived experience of this informs them in ways that allow us to see varying the intersectionality of oppression, how the tools of oppression are used so that we lose out on the greatest tool of liberation available to us: working together. Instead, we’re driven apart, which benefits the powers that be.

In Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis hypothesized that it was in large part because black men were supportive of Black feminists, eg, Frederick Douglass and the early Black abolitionist-feminists (eg., Sojourner Truth), W.E.B. DuBois and the Black suffragettes. Partially because these men (men of color) were also frustrated in the system that gave some men privileges and power but denied it to them. Partially because women have differing roles in communities of color. hooks cities a Maya Angelou interview/quote for this, that Black women had direct power in Black organizations, eg., in the churches and in large-scale family gatherings, whereas white women’s power in such organizations was secondary to men²¹.

In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks showed us how men are also oppressed by the patriarchy, how they cannot know themselves until they leave behind the patriarchal thinking that drives them to domination. Instead of excluding men, she instead asks men to change. This, I believe, is the far more effective strategy.

This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die…Women and female and male children…have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change...It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change.²²

Through The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks mourns the loss of a nascent men’s movement that advocated for change, that were not welcome by second-wave feminism that sprung up around the same time. She shows men how the patriarchy has harmed them, how men cannot be themselves because of those harm. This is something Amia Srinivasan also touched upon in The Right to Sex - how the patriarchy enforces bullying, how it enforces men’s lack of emotional connection with themselves and to others. As a result, today, we’ve been left with the more harmful men’s rights and incel movements - movements that also act as pipelines to racism and far right extremism.

The main idea of The Will to Change, however, is to summed up in the quote above: that it offers a blueprint for men to change, and for women to encourage rather than hold back that change. I won’t go into details of that book here (adjacent but off topic), but if you’re interested, I’ve written a summary with questions to think about and shared that here.

Where Could Feminism Go From Here

In her writing, and especially through Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks showed us where earlier feminist movement had been weak and non-inclusive. Instead, she offered a vision and blueprint for feminism as is a global movement, with a common language, for all of us, instead of a movement that was only for the personal, material benefit of white, middle- and upper-class women in the West. If you are a woman that fits that category, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center might not be the easiest read. Though, of course, to not read for that reason is to do what hooks experienced in person: to silence because of discomfort. Because hooks is much more direct than I was in this essay. She’s at times accusatory toward white, middle- and upper-class women in the West (eg, of silencing Black women and act narcissistically).

I loved the book, and bell hooks’ thinking in general. Rather than calling for sexual separatism, she recognized how that call would make the feminist movement exclusionary and less successful. Rather than allowing white women to continue to dominate feminist movements, ask too much of others (eg., “political lesbianism”, silence), she called on those women to work toward the greater good for all women instead of their domination of the movement for their personal benefit. She asked for all of us to recognize and work toward the particular oppression of women who are/were poor and working-class and non-white, for that too to be addressed through feminism, which would the way to get those women on board with feminism.

There are a few pieces missing, eg, to hooks’ work you could add, such as Andrea Dworkin’s thinking on conservative (which would include trad wives and Republican wives) women’s complicity with men, hooks doesn’t address how heterosexual women exclude lesbians from movements in general (eg., many heterosexual or heteronormative (including bisexual women with boyfriends who have said such to me) feel that lesbians are “less women” than them), and at least in this book, she doesn’t address #metoo (it was before her time) or violence against women head on.

Still, you could can easily incorporate those into her work, and envision a feminist movement - emphasis on movement, on working together, for the good of all. hooks left us with a blueprint, we can build off of it. And this, reader, this is the type of movement we desperately, desperately need right now, now when the rights of the oppression hang ever more precariously in the balance.

unknown literary canon is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to preserving and archiving lesser known literary works, and especially, feminist thought and lesbian literature, poetry, art, and history. if you would like to support this project, please like, share, comment, and if you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Any and all form of support are deeply appreciated!

1. There are a lot of factors that goes into this; eg, community property versus separate property state. I don’t want to get into anything that sounds like legal advice, so if the topic is interesting to you, speak to a family lawyer or do more research into it.

2. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015).

3. ibid, p 1.

4. ibid p 25.

5. In the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 123 women and girls, and 23 men were killed. They were mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants. The workers had been locked in, and the only means of escape was jumping from high windows.

6. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. (New York: Vintage Books. 1983). p 93.

Davis wrote that in 1899 Pennsylvania, 91% of Black women were domestic workers (meaning maids, laundry women, et al). The only state in which Black women were not majority-employed in domestic service was Delaware, to give you an idea of how widespread the problem is.

7. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015). p. 96.

8. Numerous links to back this assertion: 1 , 2 , 3 .

9. ibid, introduction.

10. ibid, p 14.

11. ibid, p 17.

12. I only spent three weeks with that group. I generally avoid groups that identify as leftist these days.

After that, I began a survivor advocate, which lead me to feminism.

13. ibid, p 29.

14. ibid, p. 26.

15. ibid, p 29.

16. ibid, p 29.

17. hooks called herself “queer-pas-gay”, and said that she chose that term because being queer is “not who you're having sex with, but about being at odds with everything around it. In that interview, she also said she had been celibate for 17 years.

18. The Furies, Vol. 1, Issue 1, as quoted at "The Furies". Archived from the original on 2012-02-08. Retrieved 2011-03-11.

19. Leeds Revolutionary Working Group. Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism. 1979.

You can read it here: https://materialfeminista.milharal.org/files/2012/10/Political-Lesbianism-The-Case-Against-Heterosexuality-LRFG.pdf

20. Some of the inspiration for this line of thinking is from Andrea Chu Long; specifically, her essay for N + 1, On Liking Women. I don’t agree with much of what she says in this essay, or in others - especially on how she defines womanhood (eg., “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is” - apparently, she excludes stone butches from womanhood, as well as gay men or possibly men who get blow jobs…and reduces “female” to a sexual object) but she has a few other insights that are sharp and insightful.

21. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015). p. 70-71.

22. hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). p. xv - xvii