Women Race & Class by Angela Y Davis *****

For Women’s History Month, I read Women Race & Class by Angela Y Davis. This book was written 40 years ago, but it reminded me of several contemporary civil rights campaigns. Me too. Black lives matter. $15 minimum wage. Women, Race, and Class. If you’re interested in the history of these struggles, I recommend this book.

In the pre-Civil War South, it was illegal to educate enslaved people. One of the things educated people could do was write their own passes which were required for travel.

Prior to the civil war, men and women worked side-by-side in the fields promoting equality of the sexes.

There was always racism in the North, just not enslaved people. Miss Crandall opened a school for black girls in Connecticut. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

Woman’s suffrage was promoted as  a way to assure white supremacy at the polls (coupled with a literacy requirement to vote).

The women’s suffrage movement excluded blacks so as not to offend the Southern state, but the Southern states refused to ratify the 19^th amendment anyway.

Did they know that “a colored man once said that if he owned Hell and Texas, he would prefer to rent out Texas and live in Hell…”?

Lynching pre-Civil War was reserved for white abolitionists. Black rapists did not exist until reconstruction when the myth was created to justify black lynchings.

Before birth control, there was voluntary motherhood.

Sojourner Truth’s famous speech against the idea that women were fragile and weak: I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

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