Women, race & class

As a cis-male, reading this book gave me a lot of insight to the lives women faced tracing back to slavery to modern day. It was important for me to read this because I want to be a better feminist. The people I read about I will never forget. Prudence Crandall and Ida B. Wells are some of them. They fought against the grain and that gives me inspiration to fight against the rising powers of fascism. I learned about the abolition movement and how women pioneered it. I learned about the suffrage movement and how it was once a force of nature and how it then became a racist movement. I learned about the beginnings of racism and sexism in the United States. This book gave me the basic knowledge I can then educate other cis-men who don't know about these movements. I want to thank Davis for making this a read I can understand. I also want to thank all the women who changed the world. I also want to thank the women I know in my personal life. I also want to thank my mom for giving me life.

Back when I was a kid the word “feminista” would be thrown around in my house as if it were a venomous poison capable of the worst wrong doings, early on in my teenage years I came in contact with the mainstream definition of said word and ended up thinking to myself how could anyone not be a feminist.

 As someone who was constantly referred as “the feminist in the class” I still cannot believe how ignorant I was of the history, oppression, and bias on which the premises and the “popular definition” of feminism were built upon. I genuinely think that this book is a necessary reading for anyone who is interested not only in intersectional feminism but also in acquiring an ampler perception of the socialization of housework, the beginnings of the labor/socialist movements in the US, the social and political history of slavery in the USA and the history of the women’s movement (including the raw differences between white bourgeois feminism and colored feminism).

This short rambling is in no shape or form a complete or concrete review of this book, I personally have only read 2 other works by Angela Davis and do not think I am acquainted enough with her writing or with feminist theory to truly present in a written form the impact that this book has had on me. My final words are that this book has motivated me to finally delve into a more intense study of feminist literature and feminist theory and I have Angela Davis to thank for it.

[cw slavery, rape]

1) "If and when a historian sets the record straight on the experiences of enslaved Black women, she (or he) will have performed an inestimable service. It is not for the sake of historical accuracy alone that such a study should be conducted, for lessons can be gleaned from the slave era which will shed light upon Black women's and all women's current battle for emancipation. As a layperson, I can only propose some tentative ideas which might possibly guide a reexamination of the history of Black women during slavery."

2) "Of course the Republicans did not lend their support to woman suffrage after the Union victory was won. But it was not so much because they were men, it was rather because, as politicians, they were beholden to the dominant economic interests of the period. Insofar as the military contest between the North and the South was a war to overthrow the Southern slaveholding class, it was a war which had been basically conducted in the interests of the Northern bourgeoisie, i.e., the young and enthusiastic industrial capitalists who found their political voice in the Republican party. The Northern capitalists sought economic control over the entire nation. Their struggle against the Southern slaveocracy did not therefore mean that they supported the liberation of Black men or women as human beings.
If woman suffrage was not to be included in the postwar agenda of the Republican party, neither were the innate political rights of Black people of any real concern to these triumphant politicians. That they conceded the necessity of extending the vote to newly emancipated Black men in the South did not imply that they favored Black males over white females. Black male suffrage—as spelled out in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments proposed by the Republicans—was a tactical move designed to ensure the political hegemony of the Republican party in the chaotic postwar South. The Republican Senate leader Charles Sumner had been a passionate proponent of woman suffrage until the postwar period brought a sudden change in his attitude. The extension of the vote to women, he then insisted, was an 'inopportune' demand. In other words, '...the Republicans wanted nothing to interfere with winning two million black votes for their party.'"

3) "During her train trip to the convention Lottie Jackson had suffered the indignities of the railroads' segregationist policies.
[...]
As the convention's presiding officer, Susan B. Anthony brought the discussion on the Black woman's resolution to a close. Her comments assured the overwhelming defeat of the resolution:
'We women are a helpless disfranchised class. Our hands are tied. While we are in this condition, it is not for us to go passing resolutions against railroad corporations or anybody else.'
The meaning of this incident was far deeper than the issue of whether or not to send an official letter protesting a railroad company's racist policies. In refusing to defend their Black sister, the NAWSA [National American Woman Suffrage Association] symbolically abandoned the entire Black people at the moment of their most intense suffering since emancipation.
[...]
Susan B. Anthony should not, of course, be held personally responsible for the suffrage movement's racist errors. But she was the movement's most outstanding leader at the turn of the century—and her presumably 'neutral' public posture toward the fight for Black equality did indeed bolster the influence of racism within the NAWSA. Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue."

4) "The myth of the Black rapist continues to carry out the insidious work of racist ideology. It must bear a good portion of the responsibility for the failure of most anti-rape theorists to seek the identity of the enormous numbers of anonymous rapists who remain unreported, untried and unconvicted. As long as their analyses focus on accused rapists who are reported and arrested, thus on only a fraction of the rapes actually committed, Black men—and other men of color—will inevitably be viewed as the villains responsible for the current epidemic of sexual violence. The anonymity surrounding the vast majority of rapes is consequantly treated as a statistical detail—or else as a mystery whose meaning is inaccessible.
But why are there so many anonymous rapists in the first place? Might not this anonymity be a privilege enjoyed by men whose status protects them from prosecution? Although white men who are employers, executives, politicians, doctors, professors, etc., have been known to 'take advantage' of women they consider their social inferiors, their sexual misdeeds seldom come to light in court. Is it not therefore quite probable that these men of the capitalist and middle classes account for a significant proportion of the unreported rapes? Many of these unreported rapes undoubtedly involve Black women as victims: their historical experience proves that racist ideology implies an open invitation ot rape. As the basis of the license to rape Black women during slavery was the slaveholders' economic power, so the class structure of capitalist society also horbors an incentive to rape. It seems, in fact, that men of the capitalist class and their middle-class partners are immune to prosecution because they commit their sexual assaults with the same unchallenged authority that legitimizes their daily assaults on the labor and dignity of working people."