Racial Class Analysis: Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis

Angela Davis exhibits many examples of what is entailed regarding a class analysis of sexism and of racism in her book, Women, Race and Class. I have chosen a few that particularly caught my attention. Interestingly, these two forms of bigotry collide and cross over each other in our history and still do to a large extent. I have chosen four quotes from the text to discuss.

"All women were not white and all women did not enjoy the material comfort of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie." (Davis, pg. 63) This quote is of Angela Davis explaining what Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" speech seemed to point out, which is the class and racial bias of the women's movement at the time. Sojourner Truth aimed to prove that she had as much right to be emancipated as a woman as did the white bourgeois women. Neither being poor, nor being black, nor being an ex slave made her less of a women. At the time that Sojourner Truth was making public speeches, white male supremacy was the norm, and there had begun to be an attitude, within the movement, of racism and class bias.

Davis writes, ", the well known abolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher, argued that white, native-born, educated women had far more compelling claims for suffrage than did Black people and immigrants, whom he portrayed in an obviously demeaning fashion:" (Davis, pg. 71) Beecher hinted at this in a speech in New York in 1866 when it was proposed that the causes for women and blacks to gain the vote be combined into a human rights organization. Obviously it was assumed that it would be safer and moral to give white bourgeois women the vote over poor immigrants and blacks.

"When the Equal rights Association resolved to agitate for the passage of the fourteenth amendment-which curtailed the apportionment of Congressional representatives in accordance with the number of male citizens denied the right to vote in federal elections-these white women felt fundamentally betrayed. After the association voted to support the Fifteenth Amendment-which prohibited the use of race, color or previous conditions of servitude as a basis for denying citizens the right to vote- the internal friction erupted into open and strident ideological struggle." (Davis, pgs, 75 &76) For women this was an all around defeat. They were not included in the political process at all and they could not vote where the poor, immigrants, and black men were now included and could vote. There own association had made all of this possible, the men at least. This created more animosity between men and women.

Finally, we come to my last quote from the Davis text. "While their men's sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy-their common enemy- was the boss, the capitalist, or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job." (Davis, pg. 142) Davis is of course referring to the white male bourgeoisie part of society. After all the history and struggle for emancipation, the vote and for decent education, women, and men of all races and creed's, but not all classes, had to fight for fair and equal pay as well as suitable working conditions, which is still an up hill battle so to speak in American and other societies today. They had to fight the middle and upper classes to accomplish all of this and that still has not changed either.

Sources:

Women Race and Class

By Angela Davis

Published by First Vintage Books Edition, February 1983