Angela Davis: Women, Race and Class

Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis. New York: Random House, 1981, 244 pages.

By Mary Walsh

Racism and classism in the contemporary Women's Movement are more and more being acknowledged by feminists in the hope that recognition and discussion of these evils will help to eradicate them and promote unity among women. Women, Race & Class, by Angela Davis, a series of essays with a chronological progression, is thus 'not only timely but also illuminating as to how these sub-

"The inestimable importance of the Seneca Falls Declaration (of 1848] was its role as the articulated consciousness of women's rights at midcentury....However,...the Declaration all but ignored the predicament of white workingclass women, as it ignored the condition of Black women in the South and North alike.

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tle and pernicious threats to women's unity have become so ingrained in American society. Dealing primarily with three classes of women-Black, white middle class and white working class-Davis traces. the effects of economic, political and sexist influences on them throughout American history.

The oppression of the female slave was identical in many ways to that of the male slave; the woman worked as hard in the fields and was as likely to be flogged when insubordinate. However, women slaves were also the victims of sexual abuse and other mistreatment that could be inflicted only on women; rape was the ultimate expression of the slaveholder's power over his chattel. While many slave women were broken and destroyed by their inhuman treatment, most survived and in the process acquired a pride and self-reliance in their strength and ability to endure.

White middle class women, on the other hand, became more and more dependent and limited as industrialization rendered obsolete many of the productive tasks which they had performed in the home, such as spinning and candle-making. The resulting ideology of femininity-woman as wife and mother, only-carried with it the inference of inferiority. White women felt trapped and useless.

During the 1830's, white women, both workers and middle class housewives, were drawn in great numbers into the abolitionist movement. Their primary reasons, according to Davis, were moral and humanitarian, as well as a feeling of affinity with the Black women living in such terrible conditions. Also, the participation of white women in the abolition movement was an implicit protest against their oppressed roles at work and in the home. Women abolitionists, fighting sexism as well as slavery, developed organizational, fundraising and speaking skills which would flourish in the women's rights campaign a decade later.

However, in 1848, the Seneca Falls declaration concerned itself almost exclusively with the circumstances of white middle class women. Women working in the textile mills had already begun to fight for their rights, staging strikes and walk-outs and campaining for the ten-hour day, but there was only one working woman delegate at Seneca Falls. There were no Black women there at all, and the convention documents do not make even a passing reference to the condition of Black women, either in the north or the south. In contrast, in the same year, the Nationa! Convention of Colored Freedmen passed a resolution on the equality of women.

Why did this happen? According to Davis, white women did not seem to grasp the necessity for unity

between the Black and women's liberation struggles. Traditional feminism has always staunchly reflected bourgeois ideology; white middle class women were unable to realize that working class and Black women -alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes. Davis' main thesis is that while men's sexist behavior definitely needs to be challenged, the real enemy, common to men and women alike, is the boss, the capitalist, who is responsible for miserable wages and poor working conditions and who promotes and exploits racism and sexism for his own ends. This is as true now as it was a century ago.

After the Civil War, delegates to a women's rights convention in 1866 attempted to establish an Equal Rights Association to advance the rights both of Blacks and of women. However, many white women leaders, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, took the position that they would not support the right to vote of the newly emancipated Black men if women were not given the same right, a racist position which ignored that the economic and political oppression of all Blacks was qualitatively and brutally different from that of middle class women. The Equal Rights Association was hopelessly divided and dissolved in 1869, thus ending the potentially powerful alliance between Black and women's liberation.

By the 1890's, the disfranchisement of southern Blacks, the legal system of segregation and the reign of lynch laws were entrenched practices. The National American Women's Suffrage Association, formed after the collapse of the Equal Rights Association, took an officially "neutral" stand on the "color question" for fear of losing the support of white southern women members. Despite the personal feelings of Susan B. Anthony, no racist in her own friendships, as leader of the NAWSA she took the way of expediency on the question of racism, thus actually encouraging racist ideas within the suffrage campaign. In fact, in 1893 the NAWSA passed a resolution which is shockingly racist and classist in its implications:

Resolved, That without expressing any opinion on the proper qualifications for voting, we call attention to the significant fact that in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters; so that the enfranchisement of such women would settle the vexed question of rule by illiteracy, whether of home-grown or foreign-born production.

By this resolution, the NAWSA trod on the aspirations of Black and working class women as well as men, joining with the oppressors of Blacks, workers and immigrants by impliedly voting with them if given the right. In the context of the times, this position complemented the imperialistic ventures undertaken by the U.S. during the 1890's in the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, spreading racism and economic oppression throughout the world.

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Barred from membership in white women's organizations, including the NAWSA, Black women formed their own groups, not for charitable or suffrage purposes but to combat the rising wave of lynchings and sexual abuse of Black men and women which accompanied the rise of segregation laws that entrenched white supremacy. Working women too, both Black and white, were forming and joining organizations to fight for their survival. Wages, hours and working conditions were to them more im-

portant than abstract causes such as the right to vote. They knew from their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who exercised voting rights that political equality did not lead to economic equality—they continued to be miserably exploited by their employers. Even members of the Working Women's Association, formed by Susan B. Anthony in the offices of her newspaper, declined to fight for suffrage. Not until the early 20th Century did working women join the suffrage cause in any great numbers.

Many of the attitudes which split the natural unity of the women's and Black liberation movements of the 19th Century, and which separated suffragists from their working sisters, are still prevalent in the modern women's movement. Racist and classist attitudes continue to blind white feminists to the issues that are central to the lives of Black and working women. Davis' essay, "Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights,” for example, points out that although middle class feminists rightly deplore the 1977 Hyde Amendment which denied federal funding for abortions, there is no outcry against the fact that since surgical sterilizations, funded by the government, have remained free' on demand, more and more poor women have been forced by their economic circumstances to give up the very right to

Herstory: The Pol

By Linda Jane

When I saw "Reds" at the movie theater, I was curious not so much about what the movie covered, but what it omitted. "Reds" is the story of the political and amorous carcer of John Reed, American journalist, labor organizer, and Bolshevik, It is set primarily in Greenwich Village of the 1910's, the center of intense political activity for union organizers, socialists, pacifists, social reformists, and suffragists. I was particularly, interested to learn about the political lives of the Village women. It was not surprising, however, that a movie written by, produced by, directed by, and starring Warren Beatty offered little illumination. Louise Bryant, Reed's lover and fellow journalist who stowed away on a ship and trudged through waist-deep snow to rescue Reed from prison, made an impressive figure but was hardly portrayed as a political heavyweight. Only Emma Goldman gave the viewer any real relief from the image of women as vapid faces who poured coffee while the men engaged in political debate.

As I read later, Greenwich Village was teeming with feminist activity. By the early 1900's, it had established a reputation as a mecca for radicals, intellectuals, and artists. Young, educated women thronged to the Village where they became part of the vanguard of feminist ideology and activism. Most of them were socialists as well who believed that feminism and socialism could bring about widesweeping social and cultural change,

One woman who particularly stood out as a feminist theorist and activist was Crystal Eastman. Crystal was the older sister of Max Eastman, the bespectacled intellectual portrayed in the movie as the editor of the Masses, the magazine of the Village radicals. The daughter of suffragist parents, Crystal arrived in the Village in 1903 at the age of 22 to get a graduate degree in sociology from Columbia and later a law degree from NYU. The reputation she earned in investigating work-related accidents in Pittsburgh got her appointed the first woman on the New York State Employee's Liability Commission. As commissioner, she drafted the first worker's com-