Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis is Great and Dreadful

“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” (4)

I don’t know why I expected to enjoy a book about systemic racism, classism and sexism—one that features sexual assault as a major topic—but I loved Angela Davis’ 1981 nonfiction classic Women, Race & Class.

I didn’t marvel at its lyrical prose or engaging plots. My heart didn’t flutter as the articles reached their thematic climaxes. In fact, the primary emotion I felt while reading this book was dread. But dread is the perfect emotion for a book like Women, Race & Class, which explores the dark sides of the feminist movement.

“In passing the 1893 resolution, the suffragists might as well have announced that if they, as white women of the middle classes and bourgeoisie, were give the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: Black people, immigrants and uneducated white workers. It was these three groups of people whose labor was exploited and whose lives were sacrificed by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, Vanderbilts—by the new class of monopoly capitalists who were ruthlessly establishing their industrial empires” (116) 

In Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis examines American history through a feminist, antiracist and Marxist lens. Instead of focusing on a narrow period like E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, Davis picks out topics and incidents that contribute to her thesis. Short essays describe “Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” “Communist Women,” “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” and other engaging topics.

According to Davis, the American struggle for equality, particularly the feminist movement, has often been divided along lines of race and class. For example, the middle-class white women at the head of the birth control movement legitimized their concerns by appealing to eugenicists. People like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were quite racist, and even old heroes like Eugene Debs weren’t the paragons that I imagined them to be. Perhaps that’s why I felt so much dread reading this book: it’s never easy to hear that the stories you grew up on were wrong. But that’s history. Despite that dread I felt, I want to read this book again. It’s just that good.

Women, Race & Class feels like the platonic ideal of scholarly nonfiction: well-plotted, unadorned paragraphs, plenty of primary sources, and an emphasis on social history. Unlike The Making of the English Working Class—can you tell I need to read more nonfiction?—it’s both scholarly and readable.

In fact, I want to reread it. I want to highlight its important passages and write in its margins. I want to study and internalize its messages, to share it and discuss it with my friends. Reading Women, Race & Class has taught me that I love nonfiction books in a different way than their narrative counterparts. The former love is quieter, but no less ardent.