In Chapter 3, hooks offers the reader a glimpse into her own education and her formative experiences as a student. She attended an all-women’s college for a year before transferring to Stanford University, where hooks and her female classmates “were told time and time again by male professors that we were not as intelligent as the males” (13). This experience gave hooks reason to explore the internalized sexism that she and other women possessed, a reflection of their being “socialized as females by patriarchal thinking to see ourselves as inferior to men, to see ourselves as always and only in competition with one another for patriarchal approval, to look upon each other with jealousy, fear, and hatred” (14).

The internalized sexism of women, as described by hooks, stands in the way of true sisterhood. hooks encourages an authentic “political solidarity between females expressed in sisterhood” (15) against patriarchy that reflects a bond stronger than a connection that depends on “shared sympathy for common suffering” (15). The issue of classism in feminism is significant, hooks asserts, and genuine sisterhood must take “into account the needs of everyone involved” (16), especially as some women in the past “did not want to work hard to create and sustain solidarity” (16).