Women, Race & Class

Angela Y. Davis traces the history of the women's liberation movement in the United States and asks who it served. Her study begins in the days of abolition and runs to the present, and it centres on the position of Black women, who faced racism and sexism together.

Davis argues that the racist and classist biases of the movement's leaders weakened its collective ambitions. Some activists, among them Sarah and Angelina Grimke, aided Black women, and the suffrage cause found steady support in Frederick Douglass. Many other women, however, played on the fears of white supremacists to win political gain instead of working toward liberation that took race and class into account.

The book is non-fiction history and political analysis. Along the way it covers Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till and the racism of Margaret Sanger, and it weighs the legacy and the failings of both civil rights and women's rights activists.

Davis then turns to the present. She shows how the gap between Black and white women shapes current arguments over rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care. It suits readers who want a historical grounding in intersectional thinking, and it is written as a direct, forceful argument.