Women, Race, & Class

Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis

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She shows how the racist and classist bias of some in the women's movement have divided its own membership. Davis' message is clear: If we ever want equality, we're gonna have to fight for it together. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item History Additional Physical Format: Angela Y Davis Find more information about: Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.

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Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions. Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password? Each examines a different aspect of feminist struggles for equality throughout history, though they are united by one very important theme: Basically, Davis argued that the white feminist movement did not understand the needs of the black community.

Davis writes extensively about the ways that black women, who were legally freed from slavery, were still oppressed via more contemporary forms of work.

Women, Race, and Class

For example, black women were often confined to the worst working conditions, which were not much of an improvement over more overt forms of slavery. They were also frequently confined to domestic labor where they often experienced violence at the hands of male employers. Economic inequality was a major issues that feminist struggled to address. But, according to Davis, the white, middle class feminist movement did not do enough to really challenge the inequality brought about by capitalism , an economic system in which people sell their labor in exchange for a wage.

Here's the big critique: Davis felt that the white feminist movement ultimately accepted the conditions of capitalism and did not attempt to overthrow the existing economic order. In other words, Davis argues that this movement was never radical, and thus, could never truly addressing deeply entrenched inequality. It felt, to Davis, more like maintaining the status quo.

One of the most important contributions of Women, Race, and Class is is the way that Davis shows how different strands of the feminist movement were not always compatible with one another. Importantly, the goals of feminism did not always fully acknowledge the degree to which racism shaped the experiences of black women in the United States. For example, early white feminists often had to try to convince white men that a women's vote would matter.

In order to do so, they often had to rely on racist arguments that emphasized the superiority of white women. It's not that Davis was saying suffrage was not a good idea. Rather, she was pointing out the fact that some of the goals of the white feminist movement did not take into consideration the experiences of black and lower-class women. Another important example of the disjunctures between the white and black feminist movements was the issue of birth control.

White feminists often saw access to birth control as a key component of equality. However, as Davis notes, black women in the United States had been subject to policies like forced sterilization. Thus, the idea that birth control might be a point of liberation did not resonate with many black women. Davis' historical lens also carefully points out the ways that black women have always organized for equality at different points in history. Davis opens this book by acknowledging the fact that slavery often made black women stronger.

Additionally, Davis points out the ways in which there was sometimes solidarity between black and white feminist movements. For example, many feminists united around the issues of education. White feminists often participated in movements to educate black children, even under threat of persecution. Angela Davis is an extremely important activist, scholar, and feminist.

She is well known for many different works, but one of her most well-known pieces is the book Women, Race, and Class , which is a historical overview of struggles within white and black feminist movements. Davis outlines the ways that the white feminist movement was often not attuned to the most pressing issues of the black community. In this way, black and white feminist movements were not always compatible.

Ultimately, Davis argues that feminist movements were hampered by the negative effects of racism and an inability on the part of white, middle class feminists to recognize this. However, Davis does note that there were some points of commonality. For example, black and white feminists often worked together on issues of education , which was much less divisive than issues like birth control and suffrage. Although Davis wrote Women, Race, and Class in , many of the issues remain relevant today as activists seek to confront inequality based upon race, class, and gender that persists in our society.

To unlock this lesson you must be a Study. For how many of those women would actually be willing to reconcile themselves to deadening, never-ending household tasks, all for the sake of a wage? Would a wage alter the fact, as Lenin said, that. It would seem that government paychecks for housewives would further legitimise this domestic slavery. Is it not an implicit critique of the Wages for Housework Movement that women on welfare have rarely demanded compensation for keeping house?

What they want in the long run, however, is jobs and affordable public child care. The guaranteed annual income functions, therefore, as unemployment insurance pending the creation of more jobs with adequate wages along with subsidised systems of child care. Cleaning women, domestic workers, maids — these are the women who know better than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework. Their tragic predicament is brilliantly captured in the film by Ousman Sembene entitled La Noire de When the family returns to France, she enthusiastically accompanies them.

Once in France, however, she discovers she is responsible not only for the children, but for cooking, cleaning, washing, and all the other household chores. It is not long before her initial enthusiasm gives way to depression — a depression so profound that she refuses the pay offered her by her employers.

Wages cannot compensate for her slavelike situation. Lacking the means to return to Senegal, she is so overwhelmed by her despair that she chooses suicide over an indefinite destiny of cooking, sweeping, dusting, scrubbing In the United States, women of colour — and especially Black women — have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades.

In , when over half of all Black females were working outside their homes, one-third of them were employed as paid domestic workers. By over one-half were domestic servants, and in the proportion had risen to three out of five. Yet in one-third of all Black women holding jobs were still confined to their traditional occupations. Today the figure hovers around 13 percent. The enervating domestic obligations of women in general provide flagrant evidence of the power of sexism. As paid housekeepers, they have been called upon to be surrogate wives and mothers in millions of white homes.

During their more than fifty years of organising efforts, domestic workers have tried to redefine their work by rejecting the role of the surrogate housewife. Household workers have demanded in the first place a clear delineation of the jobs they are expected to perform. The Wages for Housework Movement assumes that if women were paid for being housewives, they would accordingly enjoy a higher social status.

Angela Davis

Quite a different story is told by the age-old struggles of the paid household worker, whose condition is more miserable than any other group of workers under capitalism. Over 50 percent of all U. Yet countless numbers of women are currently unable to find decent jobs. Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female unemployment rates.

They claim that while they refuse to work on the capitalist market per se, they do not wish to assign to women the permanent responsibility for housework. We are interested in reducing our work, and ultimately refusing it altogether. But as long as we work in the home for nothing, no one really cares how long or how hard we work. For capital only introduces advanced technology to cut the costs of production after wages gains by the working class.

Only if we make our work cost i. At present, we often have to go out for a second shift of work to afford the dishwasher that should cut down our housework. Once women have received the right to be paid for their work, they can raise demands for higher wages, thus compelling the capitalists to undertake the industrialisation of housework. How are women supposed to conduct the initial struggle for wages? Dalla Costa advocates the housewives strike: To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions.

Women, race, & class

But if women are to leave the home, where are they to go? How will they unite with other women? Will they really leave their homes motivated by no other desire than to protest their housework? Granted, work under conditions of capitalism is brutalising work. Granted, it is uncreative and alienating. Yet with all this, the fact remains that on the job, women can unite with their sisters — and indeed with their brothers — in order to challenge the capitalists at the point of production. As workers, as militant activists in the labour movement, women can generate the real power to fight the mainstay and beneficiary of sexism which is the monopoly capitalist system.

Recent sociological studies have revealed that housewives today are more frustrated by their lives than ever before. When Ann Oaley conducted interviews for her book The Sociology of Housework , [33] she discovered that even the housewives who initially seemed unbothered by their housework eventually expressed a very deep dissatisfaction. These comments came from a woman who held an outside factory job:. Do you like housework? I go to work and I'm only on housework half a day. I suppose you get used to it, you just do it automatically I'm happier at work than I am at home.

I suppose you get days when you feel you get up and you've got to do the same old things — you get bored, you're stuck in the same routine.

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Would wages diminish this boredom? This woman would certainly say no. A full-time housewife told Oakley about the compulsive nature of housework:. Oakley reached the conclusion that housework — particularly when it is a full-time job — so thoproughly invades the female personality that the housewife becomes indistinguishable from her job. The psychological consequence is frequently a tragically stunted personality haunted by feelings of inferiority. Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage. Other sociological studies have confirmed the acute disillusionment suffered by contemporary housewives.

The only realistic escape path from this jail is the search for work outside the home. Each one of the more than 50 percent of all U. However unsavory and unnutricious the food, however exploitative of their workers, these fast-food operations call attention to the approaching obsolescence of housework. This is the challenge emanating from the swelling ranks of women in the working class. The demand for universal and subsidised child care is a direct consequence of the rising number of working mothers.

The only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing socialist countries. Working women, therefore, have a special and vital interest in the struggle for socialism. Moreover, under capitalism, campaigns for jobs on an equal basis with men, combined with movements for institutions such as subsidised public health care, contain an explosive revolutionary potential.

This strategy calls into question the validity of monopoly capitalism and must ultimately point in the direction of socialism.

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