Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

hooks explains that feminist parenting is important if feminists hope to “create a future world where there would be no need for an anti-sexist movement” (72); to hooks, feminist parenting is an essential investment in the future.

Sexism within family dynamics is a challenging topic for feminists because “more often than not female parents were the transmitters of sexist thinking” (72), despite the ironic assumption “that any female-headed household is automatically matriarchal” (72). Often, women who head households “feel guilty about the absence of a male figure” (72-73), and they offer sexist values to children as a misguided way to replace the male influence they feel is lacking. This phenomenon reinforces the culture of patriarchal domination. One unfortunate outcome of patriarchal domination that could be avoided with feminist parenting is the one that involves “masses of children [who] are daily abused verbally and physically by women and men” (73).

Successful feminist parenting first requires a general awareness of the potential for women who have “been socialized to embrace patriarchal thinking” (74) to treat children with violence. Also, the movement must acknowledge the histories of abuse that many women possess, “abuse [that] is linked to male domination” (75), as well as the fact that “violence against children takes many forms; the most commonplace forms are acts of verbal and psychological abuse” (75).

hooks points out the dangers of shaming children, specifically the act of shaming boys when “their behavior does not conform to sexist notions of masculinity” (75). For children to develop healthy self-esteem and strong relationships with the adults in their lives, men need “to participate equally in parenting” (75). No matter whether children have a two-parent family or a single parent family, or whether the parent or parents are gay or straight, hooks is adamant: “Whenever domination is present love is lacking” (77).

At the start of this chapter, hooks explains the reasons behind a “feminist critique of marriage” (78), which range from “the double standard in relationship to sexuality” (78) to the “demand for safe, affordable birth control” (78) to the fact that many “women of all classes and races felt the brunt of male domination” (78) within the context of marriage. Thanks to this combination of difficult circumstances around marriage, contemporary feminists “critiqued marriage as yet another form of sexual slavery” (79), but hooks believes that marriage can also be liberated.

Marriage is a complex subject for feminists because it stirs up feelings of pessimism “about men changing” (79) and anxieties that marriage means that “the female body was property belonging to the individual male she was bonded with” (79). Feminists chose variations on traditional marriage to assuage these negative emotions, like living together as unmarried partners. Men sometimes found the feminist critique on marriage complex for different reasons as the “feminist movement threatened to expose male sexual shortcomings” (79) when a focus on “female sexual well-being” (79) became just as important as the sexual well-being of men. This emphasis meant that men “continually insisted that most feminists were lesbians” (80) or that women simply needed to have more sex, as an inadequate or defensive way to explain the feminist focus on the female sexual experience.

hooks points out that, despite these difficulties, “[w]hen it came to sexual freedom women made great strides” (80) and even though women choosing what they want to do and with whom “continues to disrupt and challenge the notion that the female body belongs to me” (81), other elements of domestic partnership are definitely improving. Equality in the bedroom sometimes leads to the equal sharing of duties like housework and childcare, and couples with and without children are better able “to envision a peer marriage—a relationship between equals” (81). Couples with children who work hard to co-parent their children appear to understand the “value and importance of male parenting both in regards to the well-being of children and gender equity” (82). hooks also calls for changes in the “way work is structured timewise” (82) so working men have the time they need to parent their children. hooks warns women who “[a]re not as willing to relinquish pride of place in parenting to men as feminist thinkers hoped” (83) to be more generous with the parenting role, explaining that “fathers are just as important as mothers, and can parent just as well” (83).