Women, Race & Class

Davis analyzes the historical circumstances that led to the eventual birth of the women’s rights movement—particularly the anti-slavery movement’s influence. In exploring why the anti-slavery movement received relatively widespread support from white women, Davis looks to the major changes in 19th-century white women’s lives due to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to industrialization, the economy revolved around the home and its farmland. While men typically worked on the land, women performed essential tasks such as making clothing or soap for the home. However, industrialization replaced many of women’s domestic tasks (and therefore their economic contributions) with the factory system. Industrial capitalism led to a loss of prestige and status for women in the home even as the idea that women were inferior and belonged in the home strengthened. During the pre-industrial era, women had economic equality with men as “productive workers within the home economy” (32). With the industrial changes, womanhood instead focused on a woman’s role as a mother and wife.

It is this context that, Davis argues, created circumstances that were ripe for resistance from white women unhappy with their situation—both working-class women employed in textile factories and middle-class women unhappy with oppressive domestic lives. Both classes of white women “invoked the metaphor of slavery” to describe their situations (33), but middle-class women did so more often, particularly in their description of marriage as oppressive. The perceived connection with slavery led them to support the anti-slavery movement. During the 1830s, the most prominent figures among abolitionists were middle or upper-class women, likely due to the leisure time that allowed them to become organizers.

These women had to deal with sexism in many male-organized anti-slavery societies and events. For example, in its 1833 founding meeting, the American Anti-Slavery Society only invited four women and then only allowed them to listen. To properly campaign for abolition, women also had to fight for their right to participate in politics or speak in public. Davis introduces Angelina and Sarah Grimke (the Grimke sisters) as examples of staunch advocates of both women’s rights and the anti-slavery movement despite constant attacks and backlash from men. Davis specifically praises the Grimke sisters’ unique insistence that anti-slavery and women’s rights were intertwined and that “women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people” (44).

The abolitionist movement gave white women the “opportunity to prove their worth according to standards that were not tied to their role as wives and mothers.” (39) From their involvement in the anti-slavery movement, these women gained key experiences and skills (such as organizing, petitioning, and fundraising) that would later assist their ability to fight for women’s rights.

Davis traces the limitations of the early women’s rights movement, particularly the absence of class and race considerations. An organized effort for women’s rights arose out of the male anti-slavery movement’s discrimination against and exclusion of women. Two such women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, led the effort to organize the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. The convention focused primarily on issues associated with marriage, such as wives’ lack of property rights and dependence on their husbands. Stanton also proposed the then radical idea of women’s suffrage, which even Mott did not support (though Black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, a staunch women’s rights advocate, did).

Although the Seneca Falls Declaration was historic and influential, it failed to include issues affecting white working-class or Black women. In effect, it was a declaration focused only on white middle-class women. White working-class women, such as those employed in textile mills, experienced horrible working conditions with long hours. Resistance was not lacking among these women. For example, in the late 1820s, working women performed strikes and “turn-outs.” Davis writes that their “relentless defense of their dignity as workers and as women […] had more than earned [them] the right to be lauded as pioneers of the women’s movement” (55). Davis laments that the leaders of the nascent women’s rights ignored and failed to understand the unique circumstances in which these working-class women also resisted male supremacy. She even points to the irony that among the women at the Seneca Falls Convention, the only woman who actually lived to exercise her right to vote was a working-class woman.

Similarly, the Seneca Falls Convention completely ignored Black women: No Black women attended or featured in the convention’s documents. Davis finds this surprising given both the influence of the anti-slavery movement on the leaders of the convention and Black women’s prior contributions to women’s rights—e.g., demanding education for women, paving the way for others later to do the same. Davis flags this “failure to recognize the potential for an integrated women’s movement” and “promote a broad anti-racist consciousness” as a “serious shortcoming” of the movement (59). She again cites the Grimke sisters as exceptional examples of the very few women who did actively advocate linking women’s rights with Black liberation, even recognizing the potential of an alliance with the working class—white and Black—in their efforts.

On the other hand, the Black liberation movement accepted the women’s rights effort. In fact, in 1848 the National Convention of Colored Freedmen passed a resolution that addressed the issue of equality for women. Black women’s solidarity with the women’s rights campaign was also evident in Sojourner Truth’s presence and speeches at conventions beginning in 1850. Of particular fame is her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the 1851 Akron convention, in which she strongly refuted common arguments against suffrage or for male supremacy. She gave this speech despite protests from many attendees to prevent her from speaking. Davis explains that Truth’s speech revealed the racism and class-bias among the women’s movement by emphasizing that “[a]ll women were not white and all women did not enjoy the material comfort of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie” (63).

Lastly, Davis criticizes the failure of white abolitionists, and later the leaders of the women’s rights movement, to recognize the threat of Northern capitalism and its exploitation of workers. They chose to either defend or remain silent on capitalism and failed to see how slavery, Northern capitalist exploitation of the working class, and women’s oppression “might be systematically related” (66). Slavery (to abolitionists) and male supremacy (to women’s rights supporters) were viewed as “immoral flaw[s] in their otherwise acceptable society” (66).