Women, RACE and CLASS

Off Our Backs, Jan/Feb 2005 by Winter, Amy

Women, RACE and CLASS Angela Y. Davis, Random House, 1981

Women, Race, and Class provides an important analysis of a crucial period in women's history. In the first chapter, Davis critiques the work of a number of writers, mostly male, who have advanced various theories about slavery and the Black family, and concludes, "Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive equality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations."

Building on this strong challenge to racist ideas about Black families, Davis goes on to detail the complicated history of Black and woman suffrage in the United States. She explains the often divergent interests of the movement for women's suffrage from those of lower-class women working in factories and Black women who worked as domestics and were denied access to education.

She describes the role of Frederick Douglass in the movement for women's emancipation and William Lloyd Garrison in the abolitionist movement-showing that men can support women's rights and white people can support the rights of Black people. She also does an excellent job of demonstrating the devastating effects of succumbing to attempts to divide and conquer that are so often used against movements for justice. Several chapters address the difficulties Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced when their efforts to win the vote for women met obstacles or challenges; they resorted to racist and classist arguments about the superiority of the educated white woman's vote, in an attempt to persuade white men in power to their cause.

However, Davis' extremely detailed discussion of this period makes it clear that women of all classes and all colors participated in various social justice movements of the time, including the labor movement and the fight to secure education for all women. She also devotes a chapter to communist women activists who were active in the labor struggles of the early 20th century, women whose contributions often go unreported.

In the chapter "Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights," Davis discusses the connections between the early birth control movement and the eugenics movement, and emphasizes that birth control and sterilization, services that white women often see as liberating, have been linked to poverty and used as forms of genocide against Black, Hispanic, and Native American women in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Davis writes, "The abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they might have understood why so many of their Black sisters adopted a posture of suspicion toward their cause. They might have understood how important it was to undo the racist deeds of their predecessors, who had advocated birth control as well as compulsory sterilization as a means of eliminating the 'unfit' sectors of the population."

The chapter "Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist" provides an excellent analysis of the phenomenon of lynching and the past and present sexual abuse of Black women by white men; however, Davis' argument is weakened by her attempts to excuse the public advocacy of rape by Eldridge Cleaver and Imamu Baraka. Even if their writing were, as Davis claims, "absurd and purposely sensational," the fact is that all women are vulnerable to rape by all men, and the use of misogynist, threatening language and ideas by men of color in their own fight for liberation is no more excusable than was Stanton's and Anthony's espousal of racist arguments in the attempt to secure the vote for women.

Likewise, Davis' final chapter, "The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective," though it contains some interesting ideas, is not well argued. In attempting to answer the "wages for housework" movement, Davis writes that housework is boring and repetitive: "In the final analysis, neither women nor men should waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor productive." Her solution? "Teams of trained and wellpaid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively." I don't believe Davis has completely thought through the implications of this argument-for example, why would operating cleaning machinery be any more stimulating, creative or productive than performing house cleaning tasks by hand? And who exactly will comprise these "teams of trained and well-paid workers"? Won't it simply be the people who are paid for performing housework now-mainly Black and immigrant women? And who will produce these housework machines? Won't it simply be the people who are currently paid for factory assembly work-young women in Latin America and Asia? Isn't factory assembly work also unstimulating, repetitive and boring? And what will be the ecological cost of building and operating these machines? A better feminist approach would be to revalue the work of supporting our own lives-to reclaim housework which is devalued because it is done by women, and to insist that each person be responsible for the work of supporting her or his own existence.