Extract 2: ‘Women, Race and Class’ by Angela Davis
This extract is part of our Series 1 Topic 2 Podcast on ‘Roots of Intersectionality.’ Find the podcast here.
Context
Angela Davis is a radical African American academic and activist, who has been engaged in fighting racial injustice since the 1960s. She has written ten books, but our extract is taken from her first work, which is a history of the racial inequality in the feminist movement and women’s experiences from the abolition of slavery to the 1980s. The extract in the podcast examines the gendered roles that emerged for enslaved women as a result of white oppression and violence.
Year Published:
Author: Angela Davis
Extract
“When the abolition of the international slave trade began to threaten the expansion of the young cotton-growing industry, the slaveholding class was forced to rely on natural reproduction as the surest method of replenishing and increasing the domestic slave population. Thus a premium was placed on the slave woman’s reproductive capacity. During the decades preceding the Civil War, Black women came to be increasingly appraised for their fertility (or for the lack of it): she who was potentially the mother of ten, twelve, fourteen or more became a coveted treasure indeed. This did not mean, however, that as mothers, Black women enjoyed a more respected status than they enjoyed as workers. 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. If Black women were hardly “women” in the accepted sense, the slave system also discouraged male supremacy in Black men. Because husbands and wives, fathers and daughters were equally subjected to the slavemasters’ absolute authority, the promotion of male supremacy among the slaves might have prompted a dangerous rupture in the chain of command. Moreover, since Black women as workers could not be treated as the “weaker sex” or the “housewife,” Black men could not be candidates for the figure of “family head” and certainly not for “family provider.”
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Women were not too “feminine” to work in coal mines, in iron foundries or to be lumberjacks and ditchdiggers. When the Santee Canal was constructed in North Carolina, slave women were a full fifty percent of the labor force. 21 Women also worked on the Louisiana levees, and many of the Southern railroads still in use today were constructed, in part, by female slave labor
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Required by the masters’ demands to be as “masculine” in the performance of their work as their men, Black women must have been profoundly affected by their experiences during slavery. Some, no doubt, were broken and destroyed, yet the majority survived and, in the process, acquired qualities considered taboo by the nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood
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While it is hardly likely that these women were expressing pride in the work they performed under the ever-present threat of the whip, they must have been aware nonetheless of their enormous power—their ability to produce and create. For, as Marx put it, “labor is the living, shaping fire; it represents the impermanence of things, their temporality.”