Women, Race & Class

Women, Race and Class is a nonfiction book and historical study by author, feminist studies professor, and lifelong activist Angela Y. Davis. It is a chronological telling of the history of the women’s rights movement from the era of slavery to the time of publication (1981), especially as it relates the experiences of Black and working-class women in the United States. Davis connects history to her own era on several occasions, using lessons learned from history to strategize solutions for the future. The 1970s witnessed the continuation of several equality movements from the 1960s, such as the women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements, along with continuing protests against a never-ending war in Vietnam. This study guide refers to the paperback February 1983 First Vintage Books Edition of the book. Readers should keep the publication year in mind, as certain data and circumstances that Davis references or relies on might have significantly changed since the time of its original publishing. Additionally, this study guide contains sensitive and potentially triggering content when discussing portions of the book that concern rape and violence, including the cruel conditions of slavery.

Through her historical analysis, Davis analyzes the intersection of three topics, as reflected in the book’s title: sex, race, and class. She divides her chronological analysis into four primary time periods: (1) slavery & pre-Civil War; (2) Civil War & post-War Reconstruction era; (3) end of the 19th century and the turn of the century; and (4) overarching historical overviews with references to modern-day movements. She seeks not only to bring light to the lives and contributions of Black women and working-class women, but also to highlight how the women’s rights movement marginalized these women, particularly during the fight for suffrage. She wishes to show readers that we need to learn from past mistakes, demonstrating the potential for solidarity and the need to consider factors that go beyond one’s own interests.

Summary

Women, Race and Class begins with an overview of the status of Black and white women in the United States pre-Civil War. Chapter 1 focuses on Black women’s lives and cruel mistreatment under slavery; it considers enslaved women as targets of sexual abuse and outlines how they experienced equality in oppression, equality in their social relations with Black men, and equality in resisting slavery. Their experiences led Black women to develop qualities that did not conform to the 19th-century ideology of womanhood and therefore establish new standards of womanhood for themselves. In contrast, Chapter 2 shows how white women (particularly middle-class white women) were relegated to an inferior social status by the advent of industrialization, which transferred their domestic tasks from home to factory. Davis also sets the stage for the birth and early history of the women’s rights movement by exploring white women’s involvement in the anti-slavery movement. Chapter 3 explains the early limitations of the women’s rights movement with respect to not taking race and class into consideration, thereby ignoring the needs of Black and working-class women.

In Chapters 4 through 6, Davis constructs a picture of the suffrage movement at the end of the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era. Chapter gets to the crux of Davis’s criticism of the white, middle-class leaders of the suffrage movement, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She traces the division with the Equal Rights Association over the issue of granting Black men suffrage before white women, laying out how the suffrage movement’s leaders begin to fall into the powerful trap of racism. Chapters 5 and 6 elaborate on Black women’s lives post-emancipation, which in reality involved continued oppression in their jobs as domestic servants and ongoing racism. Black women nevertheless continued to advance the struggle for freedom, such as by fighting for education alongside white women, which Davis praises as a prime example of solidarity.

Chapters 7 and 8 describe the rising racism and lynchings at the turn of the century—a time period, Davis notes, that also saw US imperialist expansion into other territories. Chapter 7 concludes Davis’s telling of the suffrage movement’s embrace of racism by showing how fully the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) became a vehicle to safeguard white supremacy. She also more explicitly connects capitalism with social issues like racism and sexism. Her focus on the club movement in Chapter 8 serves as another spotlight on the continuing work of Black women to fight racism in the face of racism from white women’s clubs. Davis continues her critique of capitalism in Chapters 9 and 10 by tracing the contributions of working-class women to the labor movement and discussing their marginalization within the suffrage movement. She spotlights particular socialist and communist women as examples of solidarity.

Davis uses her concluding chapters to explain how these historical issues trickle into modern-day movements. Chapter 11 discusses the historical Black rapist myth developed to justify lynchings and explores its effect on Black women through the emergence of the corresponding myth of the immoral Black woman. She also shows how the rapist myth persists in the contemporary anti-rape movement. Chapter 12, traces the influence of racism and the eugenics movement on the birth control movement and the later abortion rights campaign. She concludes by discussing women’s ongoing burden of housework and the need to alleviate this burden through socialization. In all three concluding chapters, Davis discusses solutions and proposes strategies revolving around socialism and the need to recognize the complicity of capitalism in racism and sexism.