Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Women, Race and Class
From slavery to the suffrage movement: how racism and class divided feminism – and why liberation must be joint.
Introduction
Angela Davis, a philosopher who had studied with Herbert Marcuse and had been acquitted in 1972 after a trial that drew worldwide attention, published this history in 1981. Its thirteen chapters run from the lives of enslaved women through the alliance and later split between abolitionism and the early women’s movement, racism in the suffrage campaign, Black women’s clubs and Communist women, to rape and the myth of the Black rapist, birth control and the future of housework. Davis argues that white middle-class feminism repeatedly sacrificed Black and working-class women, and that women’s liberation depends on the struggles against racism and capitalism. The book is a standard text of socialist and Black feminism.
More works by Angela Davis
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made