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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) 221-226



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Book Review

Where We Stand:
Class Matters

Feminism Is for Everybody:
Passionate Politics

Women's Untold Stories:
Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity

Women and the Politics of Class


Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks. New York: Routledge Press, 2000, 164 pp., $16.95 paper.
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000, 123 pp., $12.00 paper.
Women's Untold Stories:Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity edited by Mary Romero and Abigail J. Stewart. New York: Routledge Press, 2000, 282 pp., $75.00 hardcover, $19.99 paper.
Women and the Politics of Class by Johanna Brenner. New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 330 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Explorations of the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class have constituted some of the most important feminist theoretical work of the past few decades. These four books contribute to those discussions in ways that make class a central focus and help advance liberatory theory and practice.

Three of these books weave personal experiences with analysis. In often-evocative prose, bell hooks, utilizes her own life to quickly "get to the heart of matters," developing insights and pithy truths that resonate long after her books are put down. Where We Stand is a deeply felt rendering that engages us through descriptions of her childhood and her process of coming to class awareness. In Feminism Is for Everybody, hooks's sense of urgency for people to understand what feminism truly is and its importance for liberation is palpable. Women's Untold Stories, edited by Mary Romero and Abigail J. Stewart, uses women's voices to create alternative narratives that help explicate the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class. And in Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner utilizes a Marxist class analytic approach in her explorations of theory and practice.

In Where We Stand: Class Matters, bell hooks directly confronts the "elephant in the room": the avoidance of acknowledging that America is [End Page 221] a class-based society. She notes that it has become much easier to talk about gender and race; indeed, many events that should be analyzed in terms of class are ascribed instead to gender and, particularly, to race. The lack of attention to class has serious consequences, inuring people to the widening gap between rich and poor. Early on, hooks explains the contradiction of this myth: "For so long everyone has wanted to hold on to the belief that the United States is a class-free society—that anyone who works hard enough can make it to the top. Few people stop to think that in a class-free society there is no top" (5). Thus, hooks clearly chooses class as a starting point in this book, explaining that "class warfare will be our nation's fate if we do not challenge classism" (8).

Beginning with her childhood, hooks takes us on a journey to explain how she came to understand class. She traces her roots to the "outlaw culture" of her maternal grandparents, who were part of a pre-modern Southern black agrarian culture that functioned outside the middle-class mores of society. They always worked, though not at paid jobs, and survived with their spirits and senses of self well intact. Her parents, in contrast, longed to move up. As hooks recounts, none of this was ever discussed in terms of class. However, it was discussed in terms of money or, generally, the lack of it.

Her understanding of class developed after hooks left home for college. As a scholarship student attending elite colleges, she felt like an "alien outsider." Yet outsider status afforded her the vantage point from which to fully understand the other, in this case the privileged students. As is the norm with people in dominant groups, though, there was no incentive for them to understand her working-class position...

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