Women, Race & Class (1981) by Angela Davis

Introduction 

Angela Davis is an activist and scholar from Alabama who studied French and spent more than a year in Paris as an undergraduate during the early 1960s. Being in France during this critical period for both the American Civil Rights Movement and the Algerian immigrant community in France afforded Davis a unique comparative perspective on racial politics, and grounded her activism in the politics of decolonization.

 

Intersectionality

"Intersectionality" refers to the ways in which regimes of oppression and discrimination intersect and overlap--for our purposes, primarily the ways that race and gender (as well as class) converge in different ways to produce very different experiences for people who apparently share an identity (as women, for example). The work that Davis does in studying the history of American feminism in Women, Race & Class is an essential part of the tradition of intersectional analysis (though the term hadn't yet been coined when Davis wrote these essays).

Angela Davis Addressing Rally (1974) © Bettmann/CORBIS

Questions to guide your reading...

"Working Women, Black Women and the History of the Suffrage Movement"

- According to Davis, what kinds of concerns prevented working-class women from prioritizing activism against sexism and becoming involved in the struggle for the vote?

- What did women like Susan B. Anthony hope to gain through woman suffrage? What about women like Leonora O'Reilly? What motivated African American support for woman suffrage?

- What kinds of logics were used by different communities to argue for woman suffrage?

- How did men of different communities react differently to campaigns for woman suffrage? Why?

"Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights"

- What reasons were commonly given to explain why women of color were largely absent from campaigns for abortion rights? What explanation does Davis give?

- What does Davis mean when she distinguishes between being "pro-abortion" and favoring abortion rights? (Careful, it's not what you might guess.) Why does she put working-class women in the second group? How was motherhood viewed differently by working-class and middle-class women?

- How is racism fundamental to the history of birth control in the U.S.? How was the political significance given to birth control different for white, middle-class women than for working-class women of color?