If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Did you know that some of the most celebrated figures in the women's suffrage movement actually leveraged racial prejudice to advance their own cause?
- Have you ever wondered why the standard history of feminism often ignores the critical ways that race and class redefined the struggle for equality?
- Are you curious about how the hidden history of Black women’s resistance provides a blueprint for a more inclusive and powerful justice movement today?
Listen to Women, Race & Class — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from Women, Race & Class
- Understand the roots of intersectional feminism and why mainstream, white middle-class feminism historically failed to address the overlapping oppressions of race, class, and gender.
- Discover how enslaved Black women faced a unique duality of oppression, enduring the same grueling field labor as men while suffering targeted gendered abuses like reproductive exploitation and sexual coercion.
- Learn how enslaved women forged a remarkably modern standard of womanhood, transforming the shared horrors of slavery into a foundation for self-reliance and domestic equality with their male counterparts.
- Explore the deep historical link between abolitionism and women's rights, as white working-class and middle-class women began comparing their own industrial and domestic subjugation to slavery.
- Find out how the rampant sexism experienced by female activists within the 19th-century anti-slavery movement ultimately catalyzed the organized fight for women's political emancipation.
Learning Tools
Reinforce what you learned from Women, Race & Class
Mind Map
Women, Race & Class
Intersectional Feminism
Critique of Mainstream Feminism
Interconnected Oppressions
Womanhood Under Slavery
Labor and Exploitation
Resistance and Equality
Abolitionism & Early Women's Rights
Shared Struggles
Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
Racism & Classism in Suffrage
Sojourner Truth's Intervention
Betrayal by Suffrage Leaders
Classist Voting Policies
Reproductive Rights & Eugenics
Alienation of Marginalized Women
Alignment with Eugenics
Forced Sterilization
Integrated Movement Needed
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 7
Why did Angela Davis initially reject the label of 'feminist' when her book was published in 1981?
Women, Race & Class — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Womanhood under enslavement
Chapter 3: Abolitionism and women’s rights: two intertwined struggles
Chapter 4: Racism and classism within the women’s rights movement
Chapter 5: The case for an intersectional women’s rights movement
Women, Race & Class Summary & Overview
Women, Race and Class (1981) is a collection of essays that expose how racism, sexism, and classism intertwined in the struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States. With special emphasis on the historical missteps of the mainstream feminist movement, it charts a path for an anti-racist and anti-classist feminism.
Who Should Listen to Women, Race & Class?
- Feminists looking to understand intersectionality more deeply
- History buffs
- Anyone invested in the ongoing struggle for justice
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