#women race and class

[albertserra]

Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis, 1981.

[femalethink]

Ideological exaltation of motherhood—as popular as it was during the nineteenth century—did not extend to slaves. In fact, in the eyes of the slaveholders, slave women were not mothers at all; they were simply instruments guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force. They were “breeders”—animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers.

Since slave women were classified as “breeders” as opposed to “mothers,” their infant children could be sold away from them like calves from cows. One year after the importation of Africans was halted, a South Carolina court ruled that female slaves had no legal claims whatever on their children. Consequently, according to this ruling, children could be sold away from their mothers at any age because “the young of slaves … stand on the same footing as other animals.”

As females, slave women were inherently vulnerable to all forms of sexual coercion. If the most violent punishments of men consisted in floggings and mutilations, women were flogged and mutilated, as well as raped. Rape, in fact, was an uncamouflaged expression of the slaveholder’s economic mastery and the overseer’s control over Black women as workers.

The special abuses inflicted on women thus facilitated the ruthless economic exploitation of their labor. The demands of this exploitation caused slaveowners to cast aside their orthodox sexist attitudes except for purposes of repression.

—Angela Davis, "Women, Race and Class."

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Women, Race, and Class Ch 13

The need for housework, childcare to be socialized!! Housewifery as a precondition of capitalism!

As industrial capitalism approached consolidation, the cleavage between the new economic sphere and the old home economy became ever more rigorous. The physical relocation of economic production caused by the spread of the factory system was undoubtedly a drastic transformation. But even more radical was the generalized revaluation of production necessitated by the new economic system. While homemanufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange value — in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic production revealed — beyond the physical separation of home and factory — a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labor was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor.

An important ideological by-product of this radical economic transformation was the birth of the “housewife.” Women began to be ideologically redefined as the guardians of a devalued domestic life. As ideology, however, this redefinition of women’s place was boldly contradicted by the vast numbers of immigrant women flooding the ranks of the working class in the Northeast. These white immigrant women were wage earners first and only secondarily housewives. And there were other women — millions of women — who toiled away from home as the unwilling producers of the slave economy in the South. The reality of women’s place in nineteenth-century U.S. society involved white women, whose days were spent operating factory machines for wages that were a pittance, as surely as it involved Black women, who labored under the coercion of slavery. The “housewife” reflected a partial reality, for she was really a symbol of the economic prosperity enjoyed by the emerging middle classes.

Although the “housewife” was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, nineteenth-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having stepped outside their “natural” sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions and grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super profits for the capitalists.

As a direct consequence of their outside work — as “free” women no less than as slaves — housework has never been the central focus of Black women’s lives. They have largely escaped the psychological damage industrial capitalism inflicted on white middle-class housewives, whose alleged virtues were feminine weakness and wifely submissiveness. Black women could hardly strive for weakness; they had to become strong, for their families and their communities needed their strength to survive. Evidence of the accumulated strengths Black women have forged through work, work and more work can be discovered in the contributions of the many outstanding female leaders who have emerged within the Black community. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.

Black women, however, have paid a heavy price for the strengths they have acquired and the relative independence they have enjoyed. While they have seldom been “just housewives,” they have always done their housework. They have thus carried the double burden of wage labor and housework — a double burden which always demands that working women possess the persevering powers of Sisyphus

For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized — and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.

Dalla Costa argues for a redefinition of housework based on her thesis that the private character of household services is actually an illusion. The housewife, she insists, only appears to be ministering to the private needs of her husband and children, for the real beneficiaries of her services are her husband’s present employer and the future employers of her children.

(The woman) has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered unskilled, the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role in the cycle of production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer, was visible.

The demand that housewives be paid is based on the assumption that they produce a commodity as important and as valuable as the commodities their husbands produce on the job. Adopting Dalla Costa’s logic, the Wages for Housework Movement defines housewives as creators of the labor-power sold by their family members as commodities on the capitalist market.

If the industrial revolution resulted in the structural separation of the home economy from the public economy, then housework cannot be defined as an integral component of capitalist production. It is, rather, related to production as a precondition. The employer is not concerned in the least about the way labor-power is produced and sustained, he is only concerned about its availability and its ability to generate profit. In other words, the capitalist production process presupposes the existence of a body of exploitable workers.

Is it not an implicit critique of the Wages for Housework Movement that women on welfare have rarely demanded compensation for keeping house. Not “wages for housework” but rather “a guaranteed annual income for all” is the slogan articulating the immediate alternative they have most frequently proposed to the dehumanizing welfare system. What they want in the long run, however, is jobs and affordable public child care. The guaranteed annual income functions, therefore, as unemployment insurance pending the creation of more jobs with adequate wages along with a subsidized system of child care.

[yourbelgianthings]

bourgeois ideology— and particularly its racist ingredients— must really possess the power of dissolving real images of terror into obscurity and insignifance, and of fading horrible cries of suffering human beings into barely audible murmurings and then silence.

from “women race and class” by angela davis, 1981

[areacodefan]

As a white lady, I STRONGLY recommend all white feminists read Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis. There’s a lot to learn about how white women left black women behind in the feminist movement and when you know that history, you can better accept the criticism and work to change your approach.

it is so fucking exhausting and annoying how white women, including and maybe even especially in progressive and leftist spaces, continue acting like they are not themselves still beneficiaries of tremendous privilege simply because they endure sexist or misogynistic discrimination. being a woman does not excuse the fact that you are still white and you still reap the benefits of being white! you do not get to "but sexism!" your way out of being held accountable for saying and doing racist shit!

[jack-doohan]

x

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children's culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980

Reproduced in Sister Outsider

Audiobook of Sister Outsider

[read-write-thrive]

I wanted to get a head start on palasaki week and now I’m building out a reverse AU. why do I keep doing this to myself I can’t keep starting new stuff without finishing the old stuff 😭

[letz-smoke-zaza]

« I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept. » — Angela Y. Davis

[measureformeasure]

like wrath goddess sing is not considered part of the modern feminist retelling [tm] genre but none of those books have the guts to have a scene like the one where achilles remembers beating someone enslaved to her, because the girl was also trans and was dressing as a woman and achilles perceived that as mockery of herself. the internalized transmisogyny being projected outward into class violence...

[albertserra]

Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis, 1981.

[satedsaint]

Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis

Chapter 11: Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Women, Race, and Class Ch 6

The mystifying powers of racism often emanate from its irrational, topsy-turvy logic. According to the prevailing ideology. Black people were allegedly incapable of intellectual advancement. After all, they had been chattel, naturally inferior as compared to the white epitomes of humankind. But if they really were biologically inferior, they would have manifested neither the desire nor the capability to acquire knowledge. Ergo, no prohibition of learning would have been necessary. In reality, of course, Black people had always exhibited a furious impatience as regards the acquisition of education.

The yearning for knowledge had always been there. As early as 1787, Black people petitioned the state of Massachusetts for the right to attend Boston’s free schools. After the petition was rejected. Prince Hall, who was the leader of this initiative, established a school in his own home. Perhaps the most stunning illustration of this early demand for education was the work of an African-born woman who was a former slave. In 1793 Lucy Terry Prince boldly demanded an audience before the trustees of the newly established Williams College for Men, who had refused to admit her son into the school. Unfortunately, the racist prejudices were so strong that Lucy Prince’s logic and eloquence could not sway the trustees of this Vermont institution. Yet she aggressively defended her people’s desire for — and right to — education. Two years later Lucy Terry Prince successfully defended a land claim before the highest court of the land, and according to surviving records, she remains the first woman to have addressed the Supreme Court of the United States.

Seventeen ninety-three was also the year an ex-slave woman, who had purchased her freedom, established a school in the city of New York which was known as Katy Ferguson’s School for the Poor. Her pupils, whom she recruited from the poorhouse, were both Black and white (twenty-eight and twenty respectively) 11 and were quite possibly both boys and girls. Forty years later the young white teacher Prudence Crandall steadfastly defended Black girls’ right to attend her Canterbury, Connecticut, school. Crandall persistently taught her Black pupils until she was dragged off to jail for refusing to shut down her school. Margaret Douglass was another white woman who was imprisoned in Norfolk, Virginia, for operating a school for Black children.

The most outstanding examples of white women’s sisterly solidarity with Black women are associated with Black people’s historical struggle for education. Like Prudence Crandall and Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner literally risked her life as she sought to impart knowledge to young Black women. In 1851, when she initiated her project to establish a Black teachers’ college in Washington, D.C., she had already instructed Black children in Mississippi, a state where education for Blacks was a criminal offense.

....By the time of the Hayes Betrayal and the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction, the accomplishments in education had become one of the most powerful proofs of progress during that potentially revolutionary era. Fisk University, Hampton Institute and several other Black colleges and universities had been established in the post-Civil War South. J Some 247,333 pupils were attending 4,329 schools — and these were the building blocks for the South’s first public school system, which would benefit Black and white children alike. Although the post-Reconstruction period and the attendant rise of Jim Crow education drastically diminished Black people’s educational opportunities, the impact of the Reconstruction experience could not be entirely obliterated. The dream of land was shattered for the time being and the hope for political equality waned. But the beacon of knowledge was not easily extinguished — and this was the guarantee that the fight for land and for political power would unrelentingly go on.

[mareastrorum]

Brevyn isn’t a D&D goliath blood hunter. She’s a WoW Kul Tiran enhancement shaman.

D&D Blood Hunters:

Are a martial class with the crimson rite ability to spill their own blood to temporarily enhance weapons with cold, fire, lightning, necrotic, psychic, thunder, or radiant damage (there is no rock/earth/lava version)

Don’t use fist weapons because D&D has no such weapon category (requires homebrewing, or just unarmed strikes, which generally suck for every class but monks or BH lycans)

Some subclasses have limited self-healing (Ghostslayer rite revival, Lycan regeneration, Mutant reconstruction mutagen), but only the Profane Soul subclass with a celestial pact can heal others with blood maledicts

Can be goliaths, which is a D&D race of humanoids distantly related to giants (implying they are more human than giant) that have skin reminiscent of stone.

WoW Enhancement Shamans:

Are a melee specialization that, along with the other shamans, have/had the ability to enhance weapons with fire, water, earth (which went through multiple iterations before ultimately being removed from the game in 2020, but still exists in WoW Classic), or wind at no cost

Can use fist weapons, including an iconic set that is literally molten lava fists (player characters can use this appearance as long as they have previously looted the item, so this has been a popular farm drop for shamans for more than a decade)

Always have access to a standard healing spell that can be used on others despite being primarily a DPS subclass

Because WoW has race/class restrictions, the only humans who can be shamans must be Kul Tiran (human, but Bigger), a race which was first added to the game in 2018 and playable in 2019 (when Madeleine Roux played the game (especially Classic) to immerse in the lore while writing a WoW novel, which featured several shaman characters, but none of which were Kul Tiran)

Here's a picture of the in-game item:

Man, that sure looks like molten lava claws wrapped around fists, just like the names of the twin weapons: Fist of Molten Fury and Claw of Molten Fury.

Brevyn:

Spilled blood so that "[h]ard, black stone rippling with molten fire formed around her hands"

Otherwise used bare fists instead of a standard D&D weapon

Healed other characters and had no reference to a patron or Profane Soul abilities at any point in the novel

Was a “half-goliath” with normal skin, as opposed to a D&D goliath, implying even less giant ancestry than a typical goliath (human, but Bigger)

The only thing suggesting that Brevyn isn’t a WoW shaman is that she didn’t self-rez, but you know what? Skill issue.

[molsno]

when I read about the potential future of housework in women race & class I was kind of surprised that I hadn't even considered the solution angela davis describes as a possibility before. because yeah actually the way housework is currently done is really primitive when you get down to it, and there's no good reason for it other than to keep women occupied with tiresome, thankless work.

housework could be a public service where trained professionals go door to door and use specialized tools to clean more effectively in a fraction of the time. capitalists don't even invest in creating the kinds of tools that would make housework more efficient because it's simply not profitable in most cases, and even when they do exist, they're too specialized for the average person to justify spending the amount of money necessary to buy one for their own use (just look at the price of roombas for example).

in any case, any communist movement needs to seriously address structural misogyny so that women are no longer forced to do intensive and repetitive manual labor for no reward. the solution should not be financial compensation for women, it should be freeing women from the burden of housework altogether!

[natreads]

Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis

Accessible in the way where it wasn't always expected of the reader to already know certain things (maybe due to the time of its publication), but it also never spoke down on you as if you were dumb for not knowing. Engaging, important and concise as it examines the history of the feminist movement, with a focus on gender, race, and class. A must read for anyone who calls themselves a feminist (and everyone else, in my opinion).