Women, Race & Class

Women, Race & Class Plot Summary

Introduction

Oppression never operates along a single axis. The struggles of Black women in American history reveal how racism, sexism, and class exploitation intertwine to create unique forms of subjugation that cannot be understood through any single lens. Through meticulously researched historical accounts spanning from slavery to the mid-twentieth century, the intersectional nature of oppression emerges not as an abstract theoretical concept, but as lived reality with profound consequences for those most marginalized by American society. What makes this analysis particularly illuminating is how it challenges conventional narratives about both racial justice and women's liberation movements. By examining moments where these movements either reinforced or challenged each other's core assumptions, we gain crucial insights into the complexities of solidarity work across difference. The argument methodically dismantles single-issue approaches to liberation, demonstrating how progress for some can coincide with continued or even intensified oppression for others. This dialectical approach to understanding oppression offers valuable tools for contemporary social justice work, revealing both historical precedents for effective coalition-building and cautionary tales about the consequences of failing to recognize how various forms of oppression mutually reinforce one another.

Chapter 1: Historical Foundations: Black Women's Labor and Resistance in Slavery

The institution of slavery in America subjected Black women to a unique form of oppression that differed fundamentally from the experiences of both enslaved Black men and white women. Unlike white women who were increasingly defined by Victorian ideals of domesticity and motherhood, enslaved Black women were primarily valued as laborers and breeders of new slaves. In the fields, Black women worked alongside men, performing the same brutal labor under the overseer's whip without concession to their gender. Approximately seven out of eight enslaved people worked in agricultural settings, with women constituting a significant portion of this workforce. Yet enslaved women faced additional forms of exploitation specific to their gender. Their reproductive capacities were commodified, with their fertility closely monitored and valued as a means of increasing the slaveholder's human property. After the abolition of the international slave trade, the domestic reproduction of enslaved people became increasingly important to the plantation economy. This transformation led to what some historians have called the "breeding system," where women's bodies were treated as reproductive factories. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white men was not merely incidental to slavery but was systematically encouraged and protected within the slave system. The dehumanization of Black women under slavery created paradoxical conditions for gender relations within slave communities. Because enslaved women worked alongside men and were not confined to domestic roles, they developed forms of resilience and self-reliance that distinguished them from the idealized dependent femininity expected of white women. Documentary evidence reveals countless instances where enslaved women defended themselves against sexual assault, physical abuse, and the sale of their children. Their resistance took many forms, from everyday acts of defiance to participation in escape attempts and rebellions. Black women's resistance to slavery also manifested through their roles as keepers of community knowledge and cultural practices. They preserved African healing traditions, spiritual practices, and familial bonds despite systematic attempts to destroy these connections. Women like Harriet Tubman exemplified this resistance, not only escaping slavery herself but returning repeatedly to lead others to freedom. Tubman later became the only woman in American history to plan and lead a military raid during the Civil War, further challenging conventional gender limitations. The experiences of enslaved Black women fundamentally challenge simplistic narratives about both racism and sexism in American history. Their labor was exploited without regard to gender, yet they were sexually victimized specifically because of their gender. This complex reality created conditions where Black women developed forms of resistance that addressed both racial and gender oppression simultaneously. Their struggles revealed the necessity of addressing multiple forms of oppression at once rather than prioritizing one over another.

Chapter 2: Women's Rights and Anti-Slavery: Complex Alliances and Tensions

The abolitionist movement provided crucial political training grounds for early women's rights advocates. As white women like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became involved in anti-slavery activism, they encountered both solidarity and sexism within abolitionist circles. Their experiences navigating these contradictions ultimately led to the birth of an organized movement for women's rights, though this relationship between abolitionism and feminism was never without tension and contradiction. When women attempted to participate fully in the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they were relegated to a segregated seating area and denied voting rights. This exclusion catalyzed conversations between Stanton and Mott about the need for a dedicated women's rights movement. However, this origin story oversimplifies a more complex reality. Women had been fighting for greater public roles and recognition within abolitionist organizations for nearly a decade before the London convention. Black and white female abolitionists like Maria Stewart, the Grimké sisters, and Sojourner Truth had already been challenging gender conventions by speaking publicly against slavery. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, made particularly significant contributions to connecting anti-slavery work with women's emancipation. As daughters of a prominent slaveholding family from South Carolina, they brought firsthand knowledge of slavery's horrors to Northern audiences. When criticized for speaking publicly—considered improper for women—they developed sophisticated arguments about women's right to participate in moral reform. Sarah Grimké's "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes" (1838) articulated an early feminist philosophy that connected women's subordination to other forms of oppression. Angelina Grimké explicitly linked women's rights to Black liberation, arguing that "until he [the Black man] gets his rights, we shall never have ours." Despite these promising connections, racial hierarchies persisted within the early women's rights movement. At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, widely considered the founding event of organized feminism in America, the concerns of working-class women and women of color received scant attention. The Declaration of Sentiments primarily addressed the grievances of middle-class white women, focusing on property rights in marriage, access to education and professions, and the right to vote. Frederick Douglass, the sole Black person prominently involved, provided crucial support for the controversial demand for women's suffrage. These tensions between anti-racism and feminism intensified after the Civil War, when the question of Black male suffrage divided the women's rights movement. Some white feminists resented the prioritization of Black men's voting rights over women's enfranchisement, occasionally employing racist arguments to advance their cause. This fracturing reveals how single-issue approaches to liberation can reinforce other forms of oppression when intersectionality is not centered in movement strategy.

Chapter 3: Race, Class, and Gender: The Fractured Suffrage Movement

The women's suffrage movement became a stark battleground where racial and class tensions were laid bare, especially in the post-Civil War period. When the Fifteenth Amendment proposed enfranchising Black men but not women, the movement fractured along racial lines. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the amendment unless it included women, while others, including many Black women activists, supported it as a necessary if incomplete step toward universal suffrage. Stanton, frustrated by the prioritization of Black male suffrage, resorted to explicitly racist rhetoric. In an 1869 edition of her newspaper The Revolution, she wrote: "The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro... but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom first." Such language revealed how white supremacy could infect even supposedly progressive movements when race and gender were positioned as competing rather than intersecting concerns. This fracturing had organizational consequences. The American Equal Rights Association, founded to advocate for universal suffrage regardless of race or gender, split in 1869. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, while more moderate suffragists created the American Woman Suffrage Association. Though these organizations eventually reunited in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the reconciliation came at the expense of racial justice commitments. NAWSA increasingly courted Southern white women by accommodating rather than challenging their racist views. Black women suffragists faced exclusion from white women's organizations while simultaneously fighting sexism within racial justice movements. Prominent leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper built independent political platforms from which they addressed both racism and sexism. When Wells attempted to march with the Illinois delegation in a 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, DC, white organizers asked her to walk in the segregated Black section instead. She refused, waiting until the parade started to join the Illinois group, thereby challenging the segregation without disrupting the larger demonstration. Class divisions further complicated suffrage politics. Working-class women's concerns—workplace conditions, economic exploitation, and basic survival—often differed from the priorities of middle-class suffragists focused on property rights and professional opportunities. Early labor organizers among women workers faced opposition not only from male-dominated unions but also from middle-class reformers who sometimes viewed working women with condescension. The textile mill "turn-outs" and strikes of the 1830s and 1840s demonstrated working women's militancy long before formal suffrage organizing began, yet this labor activism rarely received recognition within mainstream suffrage narratives. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 revealed the limitations of a single-issue approach to women's rights. While legally enfranchising all women, in practice it primarily benefited white women. Black women in the South faced the same barriers to voting that Black men had encountered—violence, intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests. This outcome demonstrated how formal legal equality could coexist with profound substantive inequality when intersecting oppressions remained unaddressed.

Chapter 4: Reproductive Rights: Sterilization Abuse and Birth Control Politics

The struggle for reproductive autonomy reveals how racial and economic justice intersect with gender politics in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. For Black women, the fight for reproductive freedom has historically encompassed both the right to have children and the right not to have children—a more expansive vision than what the predominantly white birth control movement often advocated. Throughout American history, Black women's reproductive capacities have been targets of external control, from forced breeding during slavery to coercive sterilization programs in the twentieth century. The modern birth control movement emerged in the early twentieth century, spearheaded by Margaret Sanger's campaign to provide women with contraceptive information and services. Initially, Sanger aligned herself with socialist and labor movements, framing birth control as a tool for working-class women's liberation. However, as she sought broader acceptance and funding, Sanger increasingly adopted the language of eugenics, the pseudo-scientific movement advocating selective breeding to "improve" the human race. By the 1920s, her American Birth Control League literature contained disturbing references to preventing the reproduction of those deemed "unfit." This eugenic influence fostered disturbing collaborations between birth control advocates and white supremacists, particularly in the South. In the 1930s and 1940s, federally funded birth control programs targeted Black communities, often promoting sterilization as the preferred method. The Negro Project, which Sanger helped establish in 1939, aimed to provide birth control to Black communities but did so through a framework that pathologized Black fertility. In a private letter, Sanger wrote about recruiting Black ministers to support the project because "we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." The horrific consequences of this eugenic approach became increasingly evident in the post-war period. By the 1970s, sterilization abuse had reached epidemic proportions among women of color. In 1973, the sisters Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, aged 12 and 14, were sterilized without their informed consent in Alabama through a federally funded program. Their case brought national attention to practices that had been ongoing for decades. Studies revealed that approximately 100,000 to 150,000 people were sterilized annually through federally funded programs, with Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and Native American women disproportionately targeted. The 1960s and 1970s saw growing resistance to sterilization abuse, led primarily by women of color. Organizations like the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse fought for mandatory waiting periods and detailed informed consent procedures. Simultaneously, many of these same activists supported legal abortion access, recognizing that both forced sterilization and forced pregnancy represented external control over women's bodies. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was celebrated as a victory, but within years, the Hyde Amendment prohibited federal funding for abortions, effectively limiting access for poor women and women of color. These contradictory policies—restricted abortion access alongside continued sterilization programs—revealed the class and race dimensions of reproductive politics. For privileged white women, the primary reproductive struggle was against restrictions on abortion and contraception. For women of color and poor women, the fight encompassed resistance to state-sponsored sterilization programs and demands for the economic resources necessary to raise children with dignity. This broader reproductive justice framework recognized that meaningful reproductive choice requires both freedom from unwanted intervention and access to necessary resources and support.

Chapter 5: Rape as a Tool of Racial Oppression and Control

Sexual violence has functioned as a mechanism of racial domination and control throughout American history. From the systematic rape of enslaved women to the lynching of Black men falsely accused of raping white women, sexual violence and its mythology have been wielfully deployed to reinforce white supremacy. This history reveals how gender-based violence intersects with racial oppression to create specific vulnerabilities for women of color while simultaneously weaponizing sexual assault allegations against men of color. During slavery, the rape of Black women by white men was institutionalized and legally sanctioned. Enslaved women had no legal protection against sexual assault, as courts held that Black women could not be raped. This sexual exploitation served multiple functions within the slave system: it reinforced the absolute power of slave owners, produced new enslaved people who were the property of the master, and functioned as a form of terrorism designed to demoralize and control the enslaved population. After emancipation, sexual violence against Black women continued, often as retaliation for their newfound freedom. During the Memphis Riot of 1866, white mobs systematically raped Black women as part of their campaign of terror against the Black community. The myth of the Black male rapist emerged in the post-Reconstruction era as a justification for lynching and a tool for undermining Black political and economic advancement. Despite evidence that most lynchings were not even triggered by allegations of rape, the specter of the Black rapist became a powerful propaganda tool for justifying racial terrorism. Between 1889 and 1929, only about one-sixth of lynching victims had been accused of rape, with most lynchings motivated by economic competition, labor disputes, or violations of racial etiquette. Nevertheless, the rape myth persisted because it effectively mobilized white fear and resentment while presenting lynching as necessary to protect white womanhood. Black women led the earliest organized resistance against lynching and rape. Ida B. Wells launched a pioneering anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s after three of her friends were lynched for operating a successful grocery store that competed with a white-owned business. Her investigative journalism systematically debunked the rape myth, demonstrating that many lynching victims were successful businessmen, labor organizers, or others who challenged white economic dominance. Wells also highlighted the hypocrisy of the South's purported concern for white women's virtue by documenting the widespread sexual abuse of Black women by white men. By the 1930s, white women in the South began to organize against lynching through the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, led by Jessie Daniel Ames. These women rejected the notion that lynching protected white womanhood, explicitly stating that they did not want violence committed in their name. Their intervention was significant in challenging the rape myth, though it came decades after Black women had initiated anti-lynching activism. The lingering influence of the myth of the Black rapist continued to shape discourse around sexual violence well into the twentieth century. Some feminist anti-rape literature of the 1970s uncritically perpetuated racial stereotypes about Black male sexuality, prompting criticism from Black feminists who pointed out how these narratives reinforced racist criminalization patterns. Meanwhile, the sexual victimization of women of color remained marginalized within mainstream anti-rape activism, despite evidence that women of color experience higher rates of sexual violence and face additional barriers to reporting and receiving support. This history demonstrates how sexual violence functions as both a tool of gender oppression and racial domination, with specific implications for women of color. An intersectional approach to combating sexual violence requires addressing both its gendered dimensions and the racial mythologies that have historically shaped responses to rape allegations.

Chapter 6: Domestic Labor: The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework

The uncompensated domestic labor performed predominantly by women represents one of the most persistent yet invisible forms of exploitation in modern society. However, the nature, meaning, and distribution of housework has varied dramatically across lines of race and class throughout American history. For Black women, domestic labor has carried a double burden—the unpaid work in their own homes and the often exploitative paid domestic service in white households. In pre-industrial America, household production was central to the economy, with women producing essential goods like textiles, candles, preserved foods, and medicines. The industrial revolution fundamentally transformed domestic labor by transferring many productive activities from the home to the factory. As middle-class white women's economic contributions were increasingly defined as "just housework," their social status diminished. Simultaneously, ideologies of femininity shifted to emphasize women's nurturing and moral qualities rather than their productive capacities. This transformation created dramatically different realities for women of different classes and races. Middle-class white women were increasingly confined to the domestic sphere and defined primarily as wives and mothers. Working-class women, including many immigrants, labored in factories while still bearing responsibility for housework in their own homes. Black women, particularly in the South, were largely excluded from factory work but forced into domestic service in white households, often working fourteen-hour days cleaning, cooking, and caring for white families before returning to manage their own domestic responsibilities. The devaluation of domestic labor affected all women but in markedly different ways. For middle-class white women, housework became an isolating and unappreciated form of labor that contributed to their economic dependence on husbands. For Black domestic workers, their labor was commodified but severely undervalued in economic terms and performed under conditions of extreme exploitation. In 1912, a domestic worker in Georgia reported working fourteen-hour days, being allowed to visit her own family only once every two weeks, and being subjected to sexual harassment by her employer. Black women's experiences challenged simplistic feminist analyses of housework as merely an instrument of female oppression. Since Black women had always worked outside their homes—during slavery and after—they did not experience domestic labor as their primary form of oppression. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted in 1920, Black women had "freedom thrust contemptuously upon them" through the necessity of wage labor, giving them a different relationship to domesticity than their white counterparts. While they suffered from the double burden of wage labor and housework, they also developed forms of resilience and communal strategies for managing domestic responsibilities that differed from the isolated nuclear family model of white middle-class households. The technological advances of the twentieth century held the potential to revolutionize domestic labor through industrialization and socialization. Labor-saving devices, prepared foods, commercial laundries, and childcare facilities could, in theory, dramatically reduce the hours devoted to housework. However, this potential has been largely unrealized because capitalism has little interest in socializing unprofitable labor traditionally performed without compensation by women. When proposed in the 1970s, initiatives like subsidized childcare centers were dismissed as economically unfeasible despite their obvious social utility. A truly revolutionary approach to domestic labor would require its fundamental reorganization—not merely a more equitable distribution of housework between men and women within individual households, but a societal commitment to valuing and supporting the essential work of social reproduction. Such a transformation would need to address how domestic labor intersects with both gender oppression and capitalist exploitation, recognizing that different women experience these intersections in vastly different ways depending on their race and class positions.

Chapter 7: Communist Women: Radical Perspectives on Race and Gender

Communist women in the United States developed some of the earliest and most sophisticated analyses of the interconnections between racism, sexism, and capitalism. From the early twentieth century through the Cold War era, women in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) worked to integrate struggles against multiple forms of oppression, often pioneering intersectional approaches decades before the term was coined. Their contributions illuminate both the possibilities and challenges of building movements that simultaneously confront different systems of domination. Lucy Parsons, a Black woman born into slavery who later became an anarchist and eventually a Communist, exemplified this radical tradition. Active from the 1880s until her death in 1942, Parsons organized industrial workers, advocated for women's rights, and challenged racial oppression. Following the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, in which her husband was executed, Parsons traveled throughout the country speaking on behalf of labor rights. While her early analysis sometimes subordinated race and gender to class struggle, she consistently highlighted how capitalism exploited women workers in particular ways, arguing that "wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them." Ella Reeve Bloor, known as "Mother Bloor," joined the Socialist Party in 1902 and later became a founding member of the Communist Party. Throughout her decades of organizing, she confronted racism within the labor movement and society at large. In 1929, when a Pittsburgh hotel refused to accommodate Black delegates to an International Labor Defense convention, Bloor organized a protest that forced the hotel to reverse its policy. During the 1930s, she included Black women like Capitola Tasker, a sharecropper from Alabama, in delegations to international women's conferences, ensuring that the voices of the most marginalized women were represented in global forums. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who began her career as an Industrial Workers of the World organizer and later joined the Communist Party, similarly integrated race and gender analyses into her work. While organizing textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, she united immigrant workers across ethnic lines while emphasizing women's central role in both workplace and community struggles. Later, when imprisoned during the McCarthy era for her Communist activities, Flynn built relationships with Black women prisoners and observed how racism structured the prison system, with Black women assigned the most difficult labor regardless of formal desegregation policies. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist born in Trinidad who emigrated to the United States as a child, developed a particularly sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding the triple oppression of Black women. In her 1949 essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women," Jones argued that Black women faced unique forms of exploitation as workers, as Black people, and as women. She criticized white progressives, including some Communists, for failing to recognize the leadership of Black women in labor struggles and for perpetuating the exploitation of Black domestic workers. Jones insisted that fighting for Black women's rights was central, not peripheral, to any revolutionary movement. These Communist women faced persecution both for their political beliefs and for challenging racial and gender hierarchies. The 1950s Smith Act trials targeted Communist women alongside men, with Claudia Jones ultimately being deported to England after her imprisonment. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was also imprisoned, while others faced surveillance, harassment, and blacklisting. Despite this repression, they maintained their commitments to integrated struggles for liberation. The legacy of these radical women challenges simplistic narratives about the development of feminist and anti-racist politics in the United States. Long before second-wave feminism or the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Communist women were developing theoretical frameworks and organizational practices that addressed multiple forms of oppression. Their experiences demonstrate both the revolutionary potential of integrated struggles and the powerful resistance such approaches face from interlocking systems of domination.

Summary

The interlocking nature of oppression demands an analytical framework that can capture how race, gender, and class work together to create distinct experiences of subjugation and resistance. This dialectical approach reveals that liberation movements themselves can reproduce hierarchies of oppression when they fail to recognize how different forms of domination mutually reinforce one another. The historical record demonstrates that the most effective challenges to systemic injustice have come from those who understood how various liberation struggles are interconnected rather than competing—from abolitionists like Sojourner Truth who challenged both racism and sexism, to Communist organizers like Claudia Jones who theorized Black women's triple oppression, to reproductive justice advocates who fought simultaneously against forced sterilization and for abortion access. What emerges from this historical analysis is not merely an intellectual framework but a strategic imperative for social change. When movements for justice recognize and address intersecting oppressions, they build more inclusive and ultimately more powerful coalitions. Conversely, when they treat one form of oppression as primary while ignoring others, they inevitably leave many people behind and often reinforce the very systems of domination they seek to dismantle. This insight offers crucial guidance for contemporary social movements confronting persistent inequalities. By understanding how racism, sexism, and class exploitation have historically worked together to maintain hierarchies of power, we gain essential tools for imagining and creating more just alternatives that can truly liberate all people.

About Author

Loading...

Angela Y. Davis

Read more