Angela Y. Davis

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. 

Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

Women, race & class

Alma

They did not, in any event, represent the accumulated experiences of all those women who toiled under the lash for their masters, worked for and protected their families, fought against slavery, and who were beaten and raped, but never subdued. It was those women who passed on to their nominally free female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality—in short, a legacy spelling out standards for a new womanhood.

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

But women suffered in different ways as well, for they were victims of sexual abuse and other barbarous mistreatment that could only be inflicted on women. Expediency governed the slaveholders’ posture toward female slaves: when it was pro table to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles.

This was one of the greatest ironies of the slave system, for in subjecting women to the most ruthless exploitation conceivable, exploitation which knew no sex distinctions, the groundwork was created not only for Black women to assert their equality through their social relations, but also to express it through their acts of resistance. 

He fails to understand that there could hardly be a basis for “delight, affection and love” as long as white men, by virtue of their economic position, had unlimited access to Black women’s bodies. 

Actually, woman’s place had always been in the home, but during the pre-industrial era, the economy itself had been centered in the home and its surrounding farmland. While men had tilled the land (often aided by their wives), the women had been manufacturers, producing fabric, clothing, candles, soap and practically all the other family necessities. Women’s place had indeed been in the home—but not simply because they bore and reared children or ministered to their husbands’ needs. They had been productive workers within the home economy and their labor had been no less respected than their men’s. When manufacturing moved out of the home and into the factory, the ideology of womanhood began to raise the wife and mother as ideals. As workers, women had at least enjoyed economic equality, but as wives, they were destined to become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands. As mothers, they would be de ned as passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life. The situation of the white housewife was full of contradictions. There was bound to be resistance.

Sojourner Truth was spontaneously applauded as the hero of the day. She had not only dealt a crushing defeat to the men’s “weaker sex” argument, but had also refuted their thesis that male supremacy was a Christian principle, since Christ himself was a man: That little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did Christ come from?

While the chains of slavery had been broken, Black people still su ered the pain of economic deprivation and they faced the terrorist violence of racist mobs in a form whose intensity was unmatched even by slavery.

 As Mother Bloor and her Communist party comrades concluded, the working class cannot assume its historical role as a revolutionary force if workers do not struggle relentlessly against the social poison of racism.

I will be strong in our common faith, dear comrade, I will be self-sufficient, to our ideals firm and true, I will be strong to keep my mind and soul outside a prison, Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you.

In the United States and other capitalist countries, rape laws as a rule were framed originally for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose daughters and wives might be assaulted. […] In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism.

Women, race & class quotes

Join the club