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From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women.

“Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

Review

Angela Y. Davis wrote the core of Women, Race, & Class in jail, and the book never lets you forget it. Not because it is angry — though it has every reason to be — but because it treats ideas as instruments of survival. This is a work of Marxist-feminist historiography that refuses to separate scholarship from political strategy. Davis is not merely documenting the past; she is building an argument about what kind of feminism can actually liberate anyone, and her answer is: not the kind that has typically called itself feminism. For Davis, the history of women's rights in the United States is a history of betrayal — not incidental, not occasional, but structural — and the betrayers are the white middle-class women who repeatedly subordinated the cause of Black liberation and the specific concerns of Black women to their own class and racial interests. The book's most distinctive contribution is not its evidence, though that is formidable, but its analytic center: Black women are not a special case added to the feminist story; they are the position from which the story makes sense at all.

Davis structures the book as a dialectical trilogy. The opening chapters argue that chattel slavery produced a distinctive Black female experience that shattered every assumption of nineteenth-century bourgeois femininity. The middle chapters trace how the abolitionist and suffrage movements, despite their early promise, systematically marginalized Black women and capitulated to white supremacy. The final chapters bring the analysis into the 1970s, showing how the same racial logic resurfaces in the anti-rape movement, the birth control campaign, and the "Wages for Housework" debate. Across thirteen chapters, Davis prosecutes a single thesis: racism, sexism, and class exploitation are not parallel oppressions but interlocking systems, and any feminism that fights only one of them will reproduce the others.

The slavery chapters remain the book's most electrifying, in part because Davis is not simply correcting the record but demonstrating that the record itself was constructed to serve the interests of the slaveholding class. She takes on the revisionist historians of the 1970s — Genovese, Blassingame, Fogel and Engerman, Gutman — and faults them for a shared blind spot: "The female slave," she writes, "was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker." This is the book's foundational move. If the slave system treated Black women as genderless laborers and as breeders whose children were saleable commodities, then the nineteenth-century ideology of the "cult of true womanhood" was never universal; it was a class-specific luxury available only to those white women whose economic dependence on fathers and husbands shielded them from the fields. Davis is careful not to romanticize the slave quarters — she acknowledges the sexual exploitation that was constitutive of the system, the routine violation of Black women's bodies by white masters — but she insists, drawing on Genovese's own evidence, that male-female relations within the quarters constituted "a closer approximation to a healthy sexual equality than was possible for whites." This is not a celebration of oppression but a recognition that equal oppression produced something like equal standing in domestic life. The revisionist historians, she argues, treated this relative equality as evidence of a "Black matriarchy" that supposedly emasculated Black men — a thesis most influentially codified in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the "tangle of pathology" in Black families. Davis demolishes this reading, marshaling Herbert Gutman's demographic research to show that slave families were more stable than the Moynihan-influenced literature assumed, and that the pathology was not in Black family structure but in the racist economic system that surrounded it.

From this foundation, Davis turns to the political history of the women's rights movement, and here her argument becomes a sustained act of disillusionment. She insists that the origin story of American feminism — the 1840 London anti-slavery convention at which Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were denied seats, supposedly germinating the idea for Seneca Falls — is a myth that erases the earlier militancy of working-class women's strikes and the political activism of free Black women like Maria Stewart. More damningly, she shows that the abolitionist movement, which gave white women their political training, created a bond of solidarity that the suffrage leadership systematically broke after the Civil War. The chapter on "Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement" is the book's moral and analytical core. Davis documents how Stanton and Anthony, faced with the prospect of Black men receiving the vote via the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments while white women remained disenfranchised, chose racism. Stanton deployed the racialized language of "Sambo" and "baboons" to argue that educated white women deserved the franchise before former slaves. Anthony declared, in the book's most infamous quotation, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman." Frederick Douglass, who had been a steadfast ally of the women's movement, argued that Black male suffrage was an emergency survival measure against lynch terror and re-enslavement; Stanton and Anthony refused that argument and allied instead with the explicitly racist Democrat George Francis Train. The Equal Rights Association dissolved in 1869 over this breach, and the women's movement split permanently. Davis does not treat this as a momentary lapse. She traces the consequences forward: Anthony asking Douglass not to attend the 1895 NAWSA convention in Atlanta for fear of offending Southern white delegates; the 1893 literacy-qualification resolution that would have disenfranchised most Black voters; Belle Kearney's 1903 New Orleans address presenting woman suffrage as the mechanism for "immediate and durable white supremacy." By the turn of the century, the mainstream suffrage movement was an instrument of white rule.

Against this narrative of betrayal, Davis reconstructs an alternative tradition — Black women's political organizing, which she argues was consistently more radical, more class-conscious, and more genuinely feminist than its white counterpart. The chapters on the Black women's club movement and on working women's suffrage leagues are acts of recovery. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who launched the anti-lynching crusade after the 1892 Memphis murders, is the protagonist here: she founded the first Black women's suffrage club, organized anti-lynching clubs, and confronted Anthony directly over the racism within NAWSA. When the General Federation of Women's Clubs excluded the Black delegate from Boston's Women's Era Club at its 1900 convention — the "Ruffin incident" — the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs was founded in response, with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Davis's portraits of individual women — Wells, Terrell, the anarchist Lucy Parsons addressing the 1905 IWW founding convention, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn articulating the "triple exploitation" thesis — are biographical capsules that double as political arguments. Each woman embodies a specific refusal: to separate race from sex, to separate labor organizing from anti-racism, to accept the terms of white feminism's "expediency." The IWW, Davis notes, was the only major labor organization of its era that practiced "absolute equality" between Black and white workers, and the Communist Party, whatever its failings, developed a serious theory and practice of Black liberation that the Socialist Party — with Eugene Debs's "we have nothing special to offer the Negro" — never matched.

The book's final three chapters shift from historical recovery to contemporary critique, and here Davis's willingness to name names becomes her sharpest weapon. Her treatment of Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will is devastating. Davis argues — following Douglass and Wells — that the "myth of the Black rapist" was a political invention, manufactured after Reconstruction to replace the discredited justifications of Black "insurrection" and "supremacy" in order to legitimize lynching. The 1931 Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching found that only about one-sixth of lynchings even alleged rape; most charged murder or other offenses. Brownmiller, Davis charges, resurrected this myth in the 1970s anti-rape movement by centering her Emmett Till and Scottsboro discussions on the figure of the Black male rapist, and by siding with white women regardless of racism. The critique extends to Diana Russell and Jean MacKellar, whom Davis accuses of skewing rape statistics to depict men of color as typical perpetrators — MacKellar's fabricated 90 percent figure against the FBI's 47 percent. Davis does not dismiss the reality of rape; she insists, rather, that the vast majority of rapists are anonymous, unprosecuted men of the capitalist and middle classes, and that focusing on arrested — disproportionately Black — men obscures the real social causes. Her own analysis treats rape as a weapon of economic domination and political terror, drawing a direct line from GIs ordered to "search" Vietnamese women "with their penises" back to slaveholders' and the Klan's use of rape to demoralize Black communities. She quotes Gerda Lerner: "The myth of the black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad black woman — both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of black men and women."

The birth control chapter is equally unsparing. Davis traces the "voluntary motherhood" movement of the nineteenth century — a progressive demand by women seeking control over their own bodies — into its capture by eugenics at the turn of the twentieth. Theodore Roosevelt's "race suicide" alarm, the presence of eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard on the board of the American Birth Control League, and Margaret Sanger's own language — "more children from the fit, less from the unfit" — are marshaled as evidence that the birth control movement was converted from an individual right for privileged women into a racist "duty" imposed on the poor. Davis quotes Sanger's 1939 letter about the "Negro Project," in which Sanger wrote bluntly: "We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea." The federally funded sterilization of the Relf sisters, Nial Ruth Cox, an estimated 24 percent of Native American women of childbearing age, and some 35 percent of Puerto Rican women are presented not as aberrations but as the logical culmination of a movement that had allied itself with population control. Davis's demand — that abortion rights and an end to sterilization abuse must be fought as a single demand, led by women of color — was prescient in 1981 and remains urgent.

The final chapter, on housework, is the book's most theoretically ambitious and its most contested. Davis, drawing on Engels and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argues that domestic labor under capitalism is technologically frozen — "primitive" labor that capitalism refuses to industrialize because socialized housework would yield no profit. Housework, she insists, is a precondition for capitalist production rather than a part of it; the test case is apartheid South Africa, where capital literally discarded Black family life by warehousing workers in sex-segregated hostels and banning unemployed Black women from 87 percent of the country. Against Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James's "Wages for Housework" demand, Davis cites Lenin: "petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades (the woman), chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery." Paying housewives, Davis argues, would legitimize "domestic slavery" rather than abolish it. The real path is the socialization of housework and child care under socialism — teams of trained, well-paid workers with advanced technology, socialized meal preparation, collective child-rearing. This is a utopian vision in the strict Marxist sense: a transformation of the material conditions of life such that the old oppressions become structurally impossible. The chapter's weakness, acknowledged by critics, is that it treats the Wages for Housework position somewhat ungenerously and elides the immediate strategic question — what do women do now, under capitalism, while awaiting the revolution? Yet the chapter is intellectually honest about its own limits: Davis is explicit that campaigns for equal jobs and public child care under capitalism "must ultimately point in the direction of socialism," and her vision of industrialized domestic work remains a genuine alternative to the neoliberal solution of exploiting poorer women of color as domestic workers to liberate richer white ones.

Davis writes from within the Marxist tradition, but she does so as a critic of its racial blind spots as much as a critic of feminism's class and racial blind spots. She faults the Socialist Party for refusing to acknowledge the unique oppression of Black people, and she notes that even the Communist Party, which she credits with the most serious theory and practice of Black liberation, initially neglected Black women in industry. The "triple exploitation" framework — articulated by Flynn, developed by Claudia Jones — is the book's methodological spine, and Davis deploys it with a rigor that exposes the limits of both single-axis Marxism and single-axis feminism. This is what places Women, Race, & Class in the Black feminist tradition that developed alongside and against mainstream feminism — a tradition that refused to choose between race and sex and that treated class as the ground on which both are constructed. The book sits in productive tension with works like Brownmiller's Against Our Will and Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, not merely disagreeing with them but showing how their racial assumptions produce distorted politics.

The book's weaknesses are structural. Its chapter-by-chapter organization sometimes forces material into a chronological container that flattens thematic connections — the leap from the suffrage chapters to the Communist women chapters, for instance, skips several decades of Black women's labor organizing that might have bridged the argument more smoothly. Davis's prose is clear and forceful — the book's clarity is one of its sub-scores I would rate highly — but it occasionally reads as a series of linked essays rather than a single integrated narrative, a legacy of its origins in courses Davis taught and in the essay she drafted while imprisoned. The statistical material, while deployed effectively, is sometimes presented as illustration rather than systematic demonstration, and readers looking for a social-scientific treatment of the data will find the evidence more rhetorical than empirical. The chapter on housework, for all its theoretical ambition, does not fully engage with the immediate strategic dilemmas facing working-class women who cannot wait for socialist transformation to address the crushing double burden of wage labor and domestic work. And the book's fierce polemical stance — while morally clarifying — occasionally flattens historical actors who might have been more complex than the narrative allows. Stanton, for instance, held contradictory positions across her long career, and some of her later writing returns to a more egalitarian register that Davis does not acknowledge.

These are not oversights so much as the costs of the book's method. Davis is writing a usable past, a history that serves present political struggle, and she is unapologetic about it. The book is a weapon as much as an analysis — "Every inequality and disability inflicted on American white women is aggravated a thousandfold among Negro women, who are triply exploited — as Negroes, as workers, and as women" — and weapons are not designed to be nuanced. What makes Women, Race, & Class endure, beyond its specific arguments, is its analytic integrity: it refuses to let the reader choose which oppression to oppose. It demands, instead, that we see how racism, sexism, and class exploitation are the same structure seen from different angles, and that any feminism that privileges one angle over the others will inevitably become an instrument of the system it claims to oppose. The evidence Davis assembles — from slave narratives to Congressional testimony, from IWW manifestos to sterilization statistics — serves this single argument with a cumulative force that makes the book feel less like a history and more like a reckoning.

This is not a book for readers seeking a dispassionate survey of American women's history. It is a book for readers who want to understand why the feminism that has achieved the most visibility in American life has so often been the feminism that left poor women and women of color behind — and what traditions of thought and organizing exist as alternatives. It belongs on the same shelf as DuBois's Black Reconstruction and Wells's anti-lynching pamphlets, works that treat historical writing as an act of political intervention. Davis is clear-eyed about the failures of the movements she chronicles, but she is not cynical. The book's heroes — Truth, Wells, Terrell, Parsons, Flynn, Jones — are women who built political organizations under conditions of extreme duress, and Davis's portraits of them are acts of love as much as analysis. The book's closing vision — socialized domestic labor, reproductive justice led by women of color, an anti-rape politics that refuses to scapegoat men of color — is not a prediction but a wager: that the triple exploitation of Black women can be the foundation for a politics that liberates everyone, rather than merely rearranging the hierarchy of who dominates whom. Whether that wager can be won is the question the book leaves unanswered, because it can only be answered in practice.

Notable Quotes

Where work was concerned, strength and productivity under the threat of the whip outweighed considerations of sex. In this sense, the oppression of women was identical to the oppression of men.

Davis on how the slave system's exploitation of women as full-time field laborers rendered gender distinctions irrelevant in the domain of work — slavery, gender equality, labor

The salient theme emerging from domestic life in the slave quarters is one of sexual equality. The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality.

Davis's argument that enslaved people transformed the negative equality of shared oppression into positive egalitarian social relations within their communities — slavery, egalitarianism, family

It was those women who passed on to their nominally free female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality -- in short, a legacy spelling out standards for a new womanhood.

The conclusion of Davis's opening chapter on slave women, linking their experiences to the ongoing struggle for women's emancipation — Black womanhood, legacy, resistance

I want to be identified with the Negro. Until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.

Angelina Grimke speaking at a convention of patriotic women supporting the Civil War effort in 1863, articulating the inseparability of Black and women's liberation — solidarity, Grimke sisters, abolition

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?

Sojourner Truth's famous 1851 speech at the Akron, Ohio women's convention, demolishing the argument that female weakness was incompatible with suffrage — Sojourner Truth, women's rights, race and gender

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the men better let them.

Sojourner Truth responding to the argument that male supremacy was a Christian principle because Christ was a man — Sojourner Truth, religion, women's power

Although this may remain a question for politicians to wrangle over for five or ten years, the black man is still, in a political point of view, far above the educated white women of the country.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1865 letter revealing the racist turn of the suffrage movement during Reconstruction, arguing white women should not let 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom of rights first — racism in feminism, Reconstruction, suffrage

When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have the same urgency to obtain the ballot.

Frederick Douglass's powerful 1869 appeal at the final Equal Rights Association convention, arguing that the physical violence against Black people made their need for the vote qualitatively more urgent — Frederick Douglass, Black suffrage, urgency

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

Sojourner Truth at the 1867 Equal Rights Association convention, opposing the Fourteenth Amendment for excluding Black women from the franchise — Sojourner Truth, intersectionality, Black women's rights

We women are a helpless disfranchised class. Our hands are tied. While we are in this condition, it is not for us to go passing resolutions against railroad corporations or anybody else.

Susan B. Anthony urging defeat of a Black woman's anti-Jim Crow resolution at the 1899 NAWSA convention, exemplifying the suffrage movement's capitulation to racism — racism in suffrage movement, expediency, Jim Crow

A colored woman's virtue in this part of the country has no protection.

A Georgia domestic worker's testimony about sexual exploitation by white employers, demonstrating the continuity of sexual coercion from slavery through post-emancipation domestic service — sexual exploitation, domestic workers, post-slavery

The myth of the black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad black woman -- both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of black men and women.

Gerda Lerner, quoted by Davis, on the intertwined racist mythologies that justified both lynching and the sexual abuse of Black women — myth of Black rapist, racism, sexual violence

History does not present an example of a transformation in the character of any class of men so extreme, so unnatural and so complete as is implied in this charge.

Frederick Douglass refuting the myth of the Black rapist by noting that no rapes of white women were reported during the Civil War, when enslaved men had unimpeded access to white households — Frederick Douglass, rape myth, logical argument

In the past ten years over a thousand black men and women and children have met this violent death at the hands of a white mob. And the rest of America has remained silent.

Ida B. Wells speaking in England in 1893, seeking international support for her anti-lynching crusade after American institutions remained indifferent — Ida B. Wells, lynching, silence

We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Margaret Sanger in a private letter about the Birth Control Federation's 'Negro Project,' revealing the racist dimension of the birth control movement's outreach to Black communities — birth control, eugenics, racism

Every inequality and disability inflicted on American white women is aggravated a thousandfold among Negro women, who are triply exploited -- as Negroes, as workers, and as women.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's 1948 analysis of Black women's oppression, anticipating the 'triple jeopardy' framework later proposed by Black feminists — triple oppression, intersectionality, Communist women

The continued relegation of Negro women to domestic work has helped to perpetuate and intensify chauvinism directed against all Negro women.

Claudia Jones arguing in Political Affairs that the equation of Black women with domestic servitude reinforced racist attitudes toward the entire group — Claudia Jones, domestic labor, racism

The club movement among colored women reaches into the sub-condition of the entire race. It is not a fad. It is rather the force of a new intelligence against the old ignorance.

Fannie Barrier Williams distinguishing the Black women's club movement from the white clubs, arguing it was fundamentally about racial uplift and survival rather than leisure activity — Black women's clubs, racial uplift, organizing

By her peculiar position, the colored woman has gained clear powers of observation and judgment -- exactly the sort of powers which are today peculiarly necessary to the building of an ideal country.

Mary Talbert's concluding remarks at a 1915 symposium on woman suffrage, arguing that Black women's unique vantage point gave them distinctive political insight — Black women's perspective, suffrage, standpoint

Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.

Frederick Douglass arguing that the franchise was indispensable for consolidating emancipation and preventing the re-enslavement of Southern Black people through economic exploitation — Frederick Douglass, franchise, emancipation

The housewife stands condemned as the worst employer in the country.

The Domestic Workers Union exposing the hypocrisy of middle-class feminists who fought for women's rights while exploiting their own Black domestic workers — domestic workers, class contradiction, feminism

Petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades the woman, chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.

Lenin, quoted by Davis in her argument against the Wages for Housework movement and for the socialization of domestic labor — housework, women's liberation, socialization

Some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan.

W. E. B. DuBois on the paradox of Black women's independence, forged through centuries of compulsory labor that gave them strengths denied to women confined to domesticity — DuBois, Black women, independence, labor

The war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles, a war upon the working classes, whether white or black.

Angelina Grimke's address to the Women's Loyal League, articulating a radical class analysis of the Civil War that linked the liberation of slaves with the emancipation of all working people — Angelina Grimke, Civil War, class solidarity

What if I am a woman?

Maria Stewart, the first native-born American woman to address audiences of both men and women, responding to attacks on her right to deliver public lectures in the 1830s — Maria Stewart, women's rights, public speaking

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?

Sojourner Truth's speech at the 1851 Akron women's convention, where she single-handedly defeated the male supremacist provocateurs and exposed the class and racial bias of the women's movement — feminism, slavery, resistance, intersectionality

The salient theme emerging from domestic life in the slave quarters is one of sexual equality. The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality. Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.

Davis's analysis of how the slave system's brutal indifference to gender paradoxically created conditions for genuine equality within the slave community — equality, slavery, family, resistance

We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might untill we take up the stumbling block out of the road.… If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?

Angelina Grimke's argument that women's rights and abolitionism were inseparable causes, responding to male abolitionists who wanted women to set aside their own demands — feminism, abolitionism, political strategy, solidarity

Every inequality and disability inflicted on American white women is aggravated a thousandfold among Negro women, who are triply exploited—as Negroes, as workers, and as women.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's articulation of the triple jeopardy facing Black women, which anticipated later intersectional analysis — intersectionality, triple oppression, class, race, gender

I would not trust him with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than ever our Saxon rulers are. If women are still to be represented by men, then I say let only the highest type of manhood stand at the helm of State.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's racist response to the question of whether she would support Black male suffrage, revealing how deeply white supremacist ideology had penetrated the women's movement — racism, suffrage, white supremacy, feminism

The myth of the black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad black woman—both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of black men and women.

Gerda Lerner, quoted by Davis in her chapter on rape and racism, connecting the fraudulent rape charge against Black men to the sexual exploitation of Black women — rape mythology, racism, sexual exploitation, ideology

Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women's will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men.

Davis's analysis of the institutionalized rape of enslaved women as a political weapon rather than an expression of sexual desire — rape, slavery, domination, resistance

The continued relegation of Negro women to domestic work has helped to perpetuate and intensify chauvinism directed against all Negro Women.

Claudia Jones's 1949 article 'An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,' arguing that the definition of Black women as servants shaped broader racist and sexist attitudes — domestic labor, racism, class, Black women

In the infinite anguish of ministering to the needs of the men and children around her, she was performing the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor.

Davis's own earlier analysis, written in a jail cell in 1971, of how enslaved women's domestic labor was the only work that served the slave community rather than the slaveholder — domestic labor, slavery, autonomy, community

The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.

Belle Kearney's 1903 address to the NAWSA convention in New Orleans, openly advocating woman suffrage as a tool of racial domination — white supremacy, suffrage, racism, political expediency

The very economic relationship of Negro women to white women, which perpetuates 'madam-maid' relationships, feeds chauvinist attitudes and makes it incumbent on white women progressives, and especially Communists, to fight consciously against all manifestations of white chauvinism, open and subtle.

Claudia Jones arguing that the domestic service relationship between Black and white women created structural conditions for racism that required active resistance — domestic labor, racism, class relations, solidarity

The leaders of the women's rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related.

Davis's assessment of the fundamental analytical failure of the early women's rights movement—its inability to see the structural connections between different forms of oppression — intersectionality, political analysis, class, race, gender

She rejoiced that the girl was dead—'now she would never know what a woman suffers as a slave'—and pleaded to be tried for murder. 'I will go singing to the gallows rather than be returned to slavery!'

The story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave who killed her own daughter rather than see her returned to bondage, illustrating the extremity of enslaved women's resistance — slavery, resistance, motherhood, desperation

The housewife, in an important sense, is her job: separation between subjective and objective elements in the situation is therefore intrinsically more difficult.

Ann Oakley's sociological finding, cited by Davis, that housework so thoroughly invades a woman's identity that she becomes psychologically indistinguishable from her domestic role — housework, identity, women's oppression, domesticity