Rating: 5/5, excellent
This book should be required reading—especially for white feminists!
Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class is a classic feminist text. It came out in 1981 but it’s just as relevant today, and I think it will be evergreen because of its well-referenced discussion of black history.
Women, Race & Class is one of the first works of intersectional feminism, that is, feminism that recognizes that intersections of race, gender, class, and other factors have a potent effect on people’s lives, especially in terms of privilege and oppression.
This book establishes that black and working-class women have different struggles than white and middle-class women and argues for a feminism that addresses these struggles instead of only focusing on the concerns of white and middle-class women.
Angela Davis writes about the history of the abolitionist and suffragist movements. The abolitionist movement helped white women find their voices, as it gave them a reason to break the taboo against public speaking. The abolitionist movement was supported by women of all races and classes, and this intersectional effort helped to make it a success.
The suffragist movement was another story—prominent suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued against giving black men the vote before white women on racist premises. Susan B. Anthony was anti-racist in private but downplayed her convictions in public to appeal to Southern women and avoid racist ire. She dismissed a secretary that wouldn’t take dictation from Ida B. Wells, but told Frederick Douglass not to come down to Georgia, fearing he’d be harassed. Anthony was afraid to do anything public that would connect the suffrage movement to the antiracist movement in case racism hurt the suffragist cause. Davis argues that Anthony’s refusal to take a stance during a time of rampant racism and lynching was not neutral as she thought, but an abandonment of her black colleagues in the movement.
Jumping forward, the fight for abortion is another issue where white feminists sometimes alienate women of color.
Davis explains:
“The failure of the abortion rights campaign to conduct a historical self-evaluation led to a dangerously superficial appraisal of Black people’s suspicious attitudes toward birth control in general. Granted, when some Black people unhesitatingly equated birth control with genocide, it did appear to be an exaggerated—even paranoiac—reaction. Yet white abortion rights activists missed a profound message, for underlying these cries of genocide were important clues about the history of the birth control movement. This movement, for example, had been known to advocate involuntary sterilization—a racist form of mass ‘birth control.’ If ever women would enjoy the right to plan their pregnancies, legal and easily accessible birth control measures and abortions would have to be complemented by an end to sterilization abuse.”
I don’t know about you, but we never learned about American eugenics or sterilization abuse in history class, yet it seems important to know. Angela Davis does a fantastic job explaining it with lots of examples. While sterilizations remained free, the Hyde Amendment of 1977 withdrew federal funding for abortions, leaving sterilization the only option for many working-class women, most of whom were people of color.
Where white upper-class women see abortion as a way to free oneself up to embrace opportunity, women of color and working-class women often see it as a solemn necessity. Women of color often feel like they don’t have the option to keep a baby, even if they may want to, so the way white feminists crow about how liberated their abortions made them feel can be alienating to women who would have preferred to have the means to support a family. Working-class women don’t see abortion as a ticket to opportunity because reproductive rights alone won’t make those opportunities available.
In general, expectations for black women and white women differ. Black women are expected to be strong and white women are expected to be weak. These are two sides of the same patriarchal, racist, capitalist coin. Black women are expected to work and carry the economy by doing the most essential, least prestigious labor. White women are expected to produce white children and this is enforced by social expectations that function like a gilded cage which is inhibitive but also protective. White feminists often underestimate the protective nature of this cage, which causes them to be unconscious of the ways it serves them, which can lead to self-sabotage. Black women can often see the privilege white feminists take for granted because they don’t possess that privilege themselves.
In the last essay, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”, Angela Davis argues that housework should be more mechanized and socialized. She says that housework is demeaning and demoralizing in its very nature and should be done by machines in the same way as repetitive factory work. She says that the only realistic way for women to escape the monotony of housework, gain societal respect, and find self-actualization is to work outside the home. She says that child care and meal preparation should be socialized. I’m not quite sure if that would work, actually… child care and meal preparation are very individualized types of labor with a strong emotional component and I don’t know if doing it communally would work as smoothly as doing it privately. I think her analysis of the weak points of other solutions (paying housewives, housewife strikes) are on point but her suggestions for alternatives are underdeveloped. If housework were socialized, someone would still have to do it. Would it really be more humanizing to do household tasks for the whole community?
Other than my skepticism about some of the solutions posed in the last chapter, Davis’s explanations of social history and conflict are invaluable. I highly recommend reading this book!
It took me a couple weeks of reading it in bed to finish it because it can be a little slow and information-dense, but it’s not too hard. Though Davis uses a Marxist lens for her analysis, Women, Race & Class is very accessible and you don’t have to know any Marxist theory or jargon to understand it.
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