Angela Davis' Women Race and Class is a fine introduction to the history of the split in the feminist movement in Amerika, despite Davis' own failure to recognize the depth of this split and its material basis. As Lenin pointed out in Imperialism and The Split in the Second International, some nations' working classes benefit from imperialism, and the social-democratic political movement sprang into existence to defend these benefits at the expense of the nations oppressed by imperialism. Similarly, because white wimmin benefit from their membership in an oppressor nation and have some gender-privileges vis-a-vis oppressed nationals, the pseudo-feminist movement came into being to defend white wimmin's privilege. Pseudo-feminists have failed oppressed-nationality wimmin, because they do not recognize that that the liberation of oppressed-nationality wimmin requires the overthrow of imperialism. Instead, pseudo-feminists have used wimmin from oppressed nationalities as bargaining chips to achieve minor reforms which serve the narrow interests of white wimmin.

For example, Davis recounts the development of the wimmin's suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the Civil War leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took up white supremacy "on the ground of expediency," as Anthony put it (p. 112). Both Anthony and Stanton opposed Black men's suffrage on narrow grounds, saying almost literally: "How dare you get the vote before us?" Stanton appropriated many of the racist myths used to justify lynching for her anti-Black men's suffrage campaign, saying "I would not trust [Black men] with my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic ... than ever our Saxon rulers are ..." (p.75). The organizations led by Stanton and Anthony allied themselves with the likes of Henry Blackwell, who made the following statement in favor of white wimmin's suffrage: "Your 4,000,000 of Southern white women will counterbalance your 4,000,000 of Negro men and women, and thus the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged " (p. 114).

Many of the false theoretical premises behind the pseudo-feminists' white-chauvinism at the turn of the century are still around today. Davis does us a favor by digging some of the old skeletons up. One of the biggest false premise Stanton, Anthony, and other early "feminists" shared was gender reductionism. Anthony used her belief that gender oppression was "the most odious oligarchy ever established on the face of the globe" to downplay other forms of oppression and to silence any critics who advocated that wimmin should also be involved in class- and nation-related struggles. As a result, Anthony tended to believe obvious liberal lies about all men having equal chances at success: "The great distinctive advantage possessed by the working men of this republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has equal chances with the son of the richest in the land" (p. 141). Gender reductionism remains a problem today, since it still allows pseudo-feminists to claim that class and nation oppression do not exist or are secondary.

Davis devotes a chapter each to "The Myth of the Black Rapist" and "Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights" - subjects which MIM has discussed extensively in MIM Notes and MIM Theory. For the most part, Davis' analysis on these subjects agree with MIM's:

(a) The myth that Black men are hypersexual is used to incarcerate them in disproportionate numbers (or lynch them), and white anti-rape activists have bought into this myth.

(b) For wimmin in oppressed nationalities, birth control is often a tool of imperialist genocide, since it involves forced sterilization or forced contraceptive use. Birth control and abortion rights activists who do not take this into account provide a "left" cover for forced sterilization programs.

The best thing Davis adds is historical perspective. In the case of the myth of the Black rapist, Davis explains how the myth was a post-Reconstruction fabrication. During the Civil War, "not a single Black man was publicly accused of raping a white woman" (p. 184). During Reconstruction, lynching was "undisguised counterinsurgency." But after Reconstruction, when much of the threat of Black power had been defused, white-supremacists needed a new excuse to continue the terrorist practice of lynching. Rape provided a good cover - although the vast majority of lynchings did not involve charges of rape (pp. 183-190).

To illustrate the link between pseudo-feminist birth-control advocates and imperialist population control programs, Davis discusses the career of Margaret Sanger. Sanger - who coined the term "birth control" - worked with the Socialist Party in the early 1910s but eventually became a eugenicist. She argued that "morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends" ought to be surgically sterilized (p. 214). Again, the theoretical basis for Sanger's reactionary positions has relevance today. According to Sanger, "women were inadvertently perpetuating the exploitation of the working class by continually flooding the labor market with new workers" (p. 213). The idea that the "population explosion" is somehow the root of poverty and oppression is the ideological underpinning of the imperialists population control programs, as MIM has explained in MIM Theory 12 (available from MIM for $6 postpaid).

Davis also does a good job of debunking by example the false idea that wimmin are powerless and therefore cannot enter the broad political struggle. She argues that the struggle for wimmin's' suffrage and emancipation was in large part a by-product of the anti-slavery struggle. Male chauvinism held back the leadership of abolitionist wimmin and therefore held back the abolitionist movement. So, as part of their participation in the anti-slavery struggle, wimmin fought male-chauvinism. "'The question of equality for women,' as Eleanore Flexner put it, was not 'a matter of abstract justice' for the Grimkes [abolitionist activists], 'but of enabling women to join in an urgent political task'" (p. 44).

Elsewhere, Davis gives an example which shows how the wimmin-are-powerless line can be used to justify complicity with reaction - in this case the Jim Crow policies of certain railroads. Susan B. Anthony's comments at a National American Women's Suffrage Association meeting squelched a resolution suggested by a black womyn: "We women are a helpless disenfranchised 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" (p. 118). According to Davis, "The meaning of this incident was far deeper" than the issue at hand. "This gesture definitively established the suffrage association as a potentially [no, concretely -MIM] reactionary political force which would cater to the demands of white supremacy" (p. 118).

MIM and Davis disagree on some very important points. The most glaring example being the question of the white working class: Davis considers it a revolutionary vehicle at this time while MIM does not. There are several passages in Women Race and Class in which Davis half-heartedly asserts that the interests of white and Black workers are united - after giving pages of anecdotes illustrating the different material conditions which led a split in "the" working class in North America.

When Davis wrote Women Race and Class, she was a member of the Communist Party-USA, which puts forward exactly this kind of head-in-the-sand dogmatism, as we have explained previously (see a review in MIM Theory 10, for example). A vestige of the CPUSA's earlier, correct line that Blacks within the U.$. form a distinct nation in need of national liberation shows up the chapter called "Communist Women." In fact, Davis recognizes that it was exactly this line that allowed the CPUSA to address issues affecting Blacks in the 1930s better than the Industrial Workers of the World or other organizations which clung to the idea that nation was unimportant. But the CPUSA dropped their recognition of the Black nation in the 1950s, and by the early 1980s idealist class-reductionism was standard CPUSA line.

Readers of Women Race and Class should refer to J. Sakai's Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat for a correct perspective on how the split in the "American" working class developed (available from MIM for $10).

Similarly, Davis fails to recognize the material basis for the split in the feminist movement, despite all the documentation for it she herself provides. She believes that the white-chauvinism in the white wimmin's movement is a result of misleadership, and that somehow white wimmin have acted against their own interests by "capitulating to racism." This leads her to soften her appraisal of reactionary movements. On the other hand MIM looks at 150 years of consistent white-chauvinist pseudo-feminism and says: "Where there's smoke, there's fire." The material benefits white wimmin gain from imperialism and the gender privileges they enjoy as a group over men and wimmin from oppressed nations create a real split between white wimmin and oppressed nationality wimmin. The manipulation of Black men's sexuality inherent in the myth of the Black rapist and forced sterilization programs for oppressed nationality wimmin are tactics for the preservation of imperialism - and patriarchy - and those groups that depend on imperialism for their privilege. Because Davis ignores the basis for the split in the feminist movement, she ultimately can't defeat the white-chauvinism she exposes.

Despite all its shortcomings, if we understand Davis's errors, Women Race and Class is a good resource for revolutionary feminists.

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