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271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
Granted they felt they had as powerful a case for suffrage as Black men. Yet in articulating their opposition with arguments invoking the privileges of white supremacy, they revealed how defenceless they remained--even after years of involvement in progressive causes--to the pernicious ideological influence of racism.[76]
In the eyes of the suffragists, “woman was the ultimate test -- if the cause of woman could be furthered, it was not wrong for women to function as scabs when male workers in their trade were on strike [139-140]
We women work secretly in the seclusion of our bed chambers because all society was built on the theory that men, not women, earned money and that men alone supported the family ... I do not believe that there was any community in which the souls of some women were not beating their wings in rebellion. For my own obscure self, I can say that every fibre of my being rebelled, although silently, all the hours that I sat and sewed gloves for a miserable pittance which, as it was earned, could never be mine. I wanted to work, but I wanted to choose my task and I wanted to collect my wages. That was my form of rebellion against the life into which I was born.
Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men during the past thirty years have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders, only three white men have been tried, convicted and executed. As no white man has been lynched for the murder of coloured people, these three executions are the only instances of the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering Negroes. [184]
Immediately following the day of Miss Wells’ return to the United States, a Negro man assaulted a white woman in New York City ‘for the purposes of lust and plunder.’ ... The circumstances of his fiendish crime may serve to convince the mulatress missionary that the promulgation in New York just now of her theory of Negro outrages is, to sya the least, inopportune.’ [192]
intersectionality (n.): the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups
During the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty. As if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc., etc...The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.Angela Davis is a well known literary and sociopolitical powerhouse in my neck of the woods. So, after a number of years of fruitlessly searching for a couple of her other works, I picked this up because, in all honesty, better to get to Davis in any kind of serious capacity sooner rather than likely much, much later. Within, I found a crossroads that began with ideas and figures I had previously engaged with, the latter including the praised (Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois), the maligned (Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone), and somewhere in between (Frederick Douglass). Many of the major ideas I had encountered previously (the falsehood of the matriarchy/weak masculinity of the Black family under slavery, the myth of the Black male rapist invented for the purposes of mass lynching, intersections between worker's rights with Communists and anti-racists as they found a great deal of common purpose), but others near the end, especially the connection between state sanctioned birth control and race genocide, did some well needed connecting of the dots that I hope to mull over with other relevant pieces of literature during the next few years. I held back on the fifth star due to various quibbles with presentation, but over all, this is a fantastic smashing to pieces of conventional views (especially the 'liberal' ones) of the US history of (white) feminism, (Black) agitation for social justice, and a good chunk of the kyriarchy of the past two centuries in terms of gender, race, and capitalism. It'd be better in my opinion if this weren't someone's introduction to all this, but Davis presents things conversationally (if a tad too myopically) enough and provides citations to further reading that it can prove a good start to a reader willing to make the effort.