
Women, Race & Class (Penguin Modern Classics)

Women were welcomed at the 1869 founding convention of the National Colored Labor Union. As the Black workers explained in one resolution, they did not want to commit ‘the mistakes heretofore made by our white fellow citizens in omitting women’. 5 This Black labor organization, created because of the exclusionary policies of white labor groups, pro
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Black people learned that emancipation’s ‘forty acres and a mule’ was a malicious rumor. They would have to fight for land; they would have to fight for political power. And after centuries of educational deprivation, they would zealously assert their right to satisfy their profound craving for learning.
Angela Y. Davis • Women, Race & Class (Penguin Modern Classics)
Campaigning for the ten-hour day, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association presented petitions to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1843 and 1844. When the Legislature agreed to hold public hearings, the Lowell women acquired the distinction of winning the very first investigation of labor conditions by a government body in the history of th
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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 fib
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It seemed, in fact, that the more women’s domestic duties shrank under the impact of industrialization, the more rigid became the assertion that ‘woman’s place is in the home.’
Angela Y. Davis • Women, Race & Class (Penguin Modern Classics)
As workers, women had at least enjoyed economic equality, but as wives, they were destined to become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands. As mothers, they would be defined as passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life. The situation of the white housewife was full of contradictions. There was bound to be resistance.
Angela Y. Davis • Women, Race & Class (Penguin Modern Classics)
By any historian’s estimate, Frederick Douglass remains the foremost male proponent of women’s emancipation of the entire nineteenth century. If Douglass deserves any serious criticism for his conduct in the controversy surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, it is not so much for his support of Black male suffrage, but rather for his
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The assumption that emancipation had rendered the former slaves equal to white women – both groups equally requiring the vote for the completion of their social equality – ignored the utter precariousness of Black people’s newly won ‘freedom’ during the post-Civil War era. While the chains of slavery had been broken, Black people still suffered the
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Once the pattern of capitulation to racism had taken hold – and especially at that historical juncture when the new and ruthless monopolist expansion required more intense forms of racism – it was inevitable that the suffragists would eventually be hurt by its backfire.