Black History Month

Women, Culture, and Politics

Angela Davis

Non-fiction, 1989

For this work, Angela Davis adapted speeches she had delivered during a five-year period in the mid-1980s. As a professor at San Francisco State University, she felt compelled to point out the ways in which gender, race, and class interact to hold back certain groups in America. Her arguments in Women, Culture, and Politics specifically apply to young black women. One essay declares that peace and the military economy in the United States are issues that pose problems that strongly affect African American women. Other sections examine daily life for women in different areas of Africa. In Egypt she interviews black women who believe that her questions about their sexual activities exemplify First World racism. Others, she reports, wonder about sexual repression in Egyptian society. Davis also pledges support for artistic endeavors and their potential effect on social mores. In her most crucial argument, however, she portrays the feminist movement as a threat to attempted alliances between labor organizations and African American groups. This she attributes to racism and classism among middle-class white feminists, and she gives examples of a long history of such attitudes going back to early American suffragettes. The only solution to this impasse would be complete socialist reform of the capitalist political structure of the United States.