Communion: The Female Search for Love

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and sexual violence and harassment.

In Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks conducts historical analysis of the stages of the feminist movement and its conception of love. The women’s rights movement in the United States began in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow women’s rights activists organized the Seneca Convention and drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, written in the style of the Declaration of Independence, which supports full civil liberties for women, including the right to vote. Stanton and her fellow activists began a 72-year campaign for women’s suffrage, with the US government finally giving women the right to vote in 1920. After suffrage was won, women’s rights activists campaigned for the right to control their own bodies.

hooks references second-wave feminism, which coincides with her college experience in the 1960s. Second-wave feminism began in the 1960s, and many scholars agree it began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 text The Feminine Mystique, which examined women’s despair with societal expectations surrounding marriage and childbearing, criticizing the postwar belief that women’s roles were solely wives and mothers.