Women, Race & Class

This powerful study of the women’s movement in the U.S. from abolitionist days to the present demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. One of the most brilliant and courageous women of our generation, Angela Yvonne Davis shows that both sexism and racism are deeply rooted in class oppression, and that neither can be eradicated without destroying the dominant patriarchal economic system. By analysing both the differences and the similarities between the experiences of black and white women, she casts new light on the past and present struggles for human rights.

This classic is being re-issued as Angela Davis delivers the Second Annual Navayana Lecture in April 2011 on “Contemporary Quests for Social Justice”.

Angela Davis is Professor Emerita at the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of seven books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; and Are Prisons Obsolete? (also available from Navayana).

Davis does an excellent job of presenting the contributions of women of color to various movements for social justice in the U.S., and analyzing the difficulties faced when justice for one group seems to conflict with justice for another.—http://www.feminist-reprise.org

The notion that poor black women are triply oppressed – by class, race and sex – is by now a truism; but the ragged course of those biases in the past and the points at which they converge today are not easily sorted out or even spotted. It is like Angela Davis, who has never shied from impossible tasks, to try. In Women, Race and Class she untangles some strands of that triple knot.—The New York Times