11 - Ambiguous Roles: The Racial Factor in American Womanhood

Summary

Writing about the attitude of black women toward the contemporary women's movement in its early phase in the United States, bell hooks observed: “Contemporary black women could not join together to fight for women's rights because we did not see 'womanhood' as an important aspect of our identity. Racist, sexist socialization had conditioned us to devalue our femaleness and to regard race as the only relevant label of identification.” The black woman's identity, she argued, had been “socialized out of existence.” In ordinary discourse “men” meant white men, “blacks” meant black men, and “women” meant white women. In the controversial and contested world of American sex roles and gender identification, how did the black woman's womanhood become submerged in her racial identity? The answer lies in the peculiar history of African Americans in the United States, in the roles African-American women played, and in the cultural justifications developed to explain the role of blacks in America. The “scientific,” cultural, and philosophical justifications of slavery constituted a dehumanization of African Americans in the white mind. As a part of this process, distinctions between different categories of African Americans were obscured or disappeared from view. Slaveholders often ignored the gender conventions Africans brought to America and considered slave women as well as men suited to hard labor.