Women, Race & Class

A history of the American women's movement read through race and class by the activist and philosopher Angela Davis. It begins with slavery, arguing that enslaved women were treated as workers as much as men were, which gave enslaved women and men a grim equality in oppression. Davis then traces the alliance between abolitionism and women's rights, and its breakdown after the Civil War, when leading suffragists used racist arguments against Black men's right to vote. Chapters follow Black women's struggles for education, the Black women's club movement, working women, and communist women organisers. Later chapters address rape and the racist myth of the Black rapist, the history of birth control and forced sterilisation, and housework, which she argues could be socialised and industrialised. Throughout, she holds that women's liberation requires ending racism and capitalism together. Critics outside the Marxist tradition question how far class explains the history she tells.

It remains one of the clearest histories of how race and class divided and strengthened the fight for women's rights, and it anticipates later intersectional feminism.