Women, Race, and Class (Book)

Women, Race and Class (original title: Women, Race and Class), is a work by Angela Y. Davis. The book begins with a critical and comparative analysis of the feminist movement in the United States within the context of anti-racist Black liberation struggles. It presents a historical account of this experience, with particular emphasis on its development under the leadership of the American Black feminist movement.

Critique of the Feminist Movement

The book examines the class and racial contradictions within the white feminist and abolitionist movements. Davis reveals how racism was embedded in various aspects of the white feminist movement through a range of debates and issues.

Racism and the Suffrage Movement

After the American Civil War, the alliance formed between the women’s suffrage movement and racist Southern politicians is examined as an example. This alliance reflected a position that granted women the right to vote while simultaneously denying this right to Black people.

Conducting the Struggles

The book addresses situations where the demands of different social groups intersect. It notes that some demands of Black women shared common ground with the demands of white women and other groups subjected to racial oppression. It also states that Black men who experienced racism in different forms were part of the same struggle as Black women.

Davis argues that to overcome the various forms of domination, a unified struggle against racism, feminism, and capitalism must be established without prioritizing any one component over the others.

Chapters

The book consists of 13 main chapters, organized historically and thematically:

1. Legacies of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood
2. The Abolitionist Movement and the Birth of Women’s Rights
3. Class and Race in the Early Women’s Rights Movement
4. Racism in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
5. The Meaning of Liberation for Black Women
6. Education and Freedom: The Perspective of Black Women
7. Women’s Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Growing Impact of Racism
8. Black Women and the Club Movement
9. Working Women, Black Women, and the History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
10. Communist Women
11. Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist
12. Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights
13. The End of Domestic Service: A Working-Class Perspective

The book also includes a final notes section.