bell hooks, pathbreaking Black feminist, dies at 69

hooks argued that feminism’s claim to speak for all women had pushed the unique experiences of working-class and Black women to the margins

bell hooks, whose incisive, wide-ranging writing on gender and race helped push feminism beyond its white, middle-class worldview to include the voices of Black and working-class women, died Wednesday at her home in Berea, Kentucky. She was 69.

Her sister Gwenda Motley said the cause was end-stage renal failure.

Starting in 1981 with her book “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,” hooks, who insisted on using all lowercase letters in her name, argued that feminism’s claim to speak for all women had pushed the unique experiences of working-class and Black women to the margins.

“A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years,” she wrote.

Instead, 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.

But her writing was also hard to pigeonhole; it encompassed literary criticism, memoir and poetry, and it tackled not just subjects like capitalism and American history but also love and friendship.

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, who was born Sept. 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a small city in the southwestern part of the state not far from the Tennessee border. Her early education took place in segregated schools, although she moved to white-majority schools once the state integrated its education system — an experience she later drew on in her memoir.

She graduated from Stanford University in 1974 with a degree in English literature and later received a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She took the pen name bell hooks as homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, to whom she was often compared as a child, and she insisted on using lowercase letters to emphasize, she often said, the “substance of books, not who I am.”

After teaching at a number of institutions, including Yale University, Oberlin College and the City College of New York, she returned to Kentucky in 2004 to take up a teaching position at Berea College in the town of Berea.