Women, Race & Class

When Angela Davis published Women, Race & Class in 1981, feminist debate in the United States was already intense, but it often treated women as a single, uniform category. Davis looks at that picture and asks: the same for whom? The experience of a middle-class white woman was never the same as that of a working-class Black woman.

The book's central argument is that gender, race, and class are intertwined, and that you cannot understand the history of women's struggles without seeing those connections. Years later, the word intersectionality came to describe this idea in academic debate, and Davis's work is often cited as one of the milestones that laid its groundwork.

The book is a critical history of the women's movement in the United States, from slavery through the 1970s. Rather than recounting only its victories, it shows where the movement failed Black and poor women, and what those failures cost everyone.

Reading the book today means remembering that it was written more than forty years ago. Even so, many of Davis's questions remain urgent: who provides care, who gets paid to provide it, and who makes decisions in places of power?

The first chapter begins with slavery, and its argument is unsettling. The nineteenth century promoted an image of women as fragile homemakers, protected from hard labor. For enslaved women, that image never reflected reality. They worked in the fields alongside men, subjected to the same exploitation and punishment.

Davis also shows how sexual violence served as a tool of domination. Enslaved women were vulnerable to abuse by their enslavers, and this was part of the system, not an exception. At the same time, their domestic roles in the slave quarters, caring for family and community, took on special importance because this work served their own people, not just the enslaver.

Davis reminds us that these women also resisted through sabotage, escape, rebellion, and the preservation of family ties. Their history, the book argues, reveals a model of strength that the image of feminine fragility erased.

The women's rights movement in the United States emerged alongside abolitionism, the struggle against slavery. Many white women campaigning against slavery realized that if they could speak out against the oppression of Black people, they should also discuss their own lack of rights. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is its best-known milestone.

Davis highlights figures who connected the two struggles. Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman who spoke at public meetings, challenged the idea that women were too fragile to vote. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, born into a slaveholding family, broke with it and fought the system. For Davis, these early years held the potential for a strong alliance.

The problem was that this alliance was fragile. White women generally had greater access to decision-making spaces than Black women, and the movement tended to follow the priorities of its wealthier, better-educated members, leaving out those who needed it most.

Davis notes that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass supported women's participation in the Seneca Falls Convention, showing that an alliance between the struggles was possible and had its defenders.