Women, Race & Class, 1981

Angela Davis’s seminal work laid important foundations for the intersectional feminism of today. In this book, Davis takes up the truism “that poor black women are triply oppressed - by class, race and sex – [...and] she untangles some strands of that triple knot. Her approach, through most of this ambitious volume, is historical. She begins with a powerful account of slavery, reminding us that virtually all black women were, from the beginning, workers ... Those female slaves worked side by side with men, sabotaged slavery at every turn, Miss Davis says, sometimes even killed their own children to spare them servitude, and, 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’” (Jones). She also examines the successes and failures of white middle class feminists in pushing for equality, and the extent to which that work included, excluded, helped, and harmed the present situation of black women.