Pioneering feminist and activist bell hooks, dies aged 69

bell hooks, a pioneering intellectual who published more than 30 books helping to push feminism from its whiteness and middle class-centered perspective to include the voices of working-class and Black women, died on Wednesday aged 69.

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

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, hooks was the fourth of seven siblings. She published her first book of poetry in 1978 and earned a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The author insisted on using all lower case letters for her pen name, borrowed from her great-grandmother, so readers would focus on the substance of her writing, rather than the author herself. Her real name was Gloria Jean Watkins.

hooks’ first major work Ain’t I a Woman? was published in 1981, and became widely recognized as an important feminist text. It was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly in 1992.

hooks believed womanhood could not be reduced to a singular experience, but has to include all races and classes. 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.

“In an imperialist racist patriarchal society that supports and condones oppression, it is not surprising that men and women judge their worth, their personal power, by their ability to oppress others,” said hooks.

She went on to write about feminism theory: From Margin to Center in 1984, All About Love: New Visions in 2000, and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity in 2004, continuing to draw on themes of feminism, race, love, and gender.

Part of hooks’ appeal was the sheer diversity of her interests. Her work, across dozens of books, encompassed literary criticism, children’s fiction, self-help, memoir, and poetry, and it tackled not just subjects like capitalism, American history, and worldwide misogyny but also love and friendship.

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives,” she said in All About Love: New Visions

hooks criticized sharply patriarchy as one of the main sources of violence in society, as she said the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

Fans and authors took Twitter to pay tribute to hook, as some of them shared their personal experiences with the author who wanted her books to be about healing and how her writings helped them regain hope, understand the world, and believe in love and compassion.

“Oh my heart, bell hooks. May she rest in power. Her loss is incalculable,” tweeted the feminist author Roxane Gay.