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Assignment 1:Davis, Ch3

In chapter three of women, race and class by Angela Davis she talks about the events/people in history that took place in the early women’s rights campaign. In this chapter she mentions something that caught my attention which was that there was no black women that attended the Seneca Falls  Convention and the only person with color was a man. During the convention they did not even mention anything about black women, which can tell you that during that time race was still a conflict even between woman that were fighting for equal rights. Integration between women was still an issue at that time. The only colored man that attended that conference that supported woman’s rights had his very own daughter a victim of inequality between black and white women by a principle that was so called an abolitionist women. Just because the principle got one of the student’s parents to object to integrating the classroom, that alone was enough to exclude his daughter. That right there proved that the abolitionist movement still needed to improve in how they deal with racism.

A black woman that Davis mentioned in this chapter, Sojourner Truth, was an important voice in creating change for the equality for black women and white women as well. Davis emphasizes that Sojourner Truth was not afraid to be brave and speak up on how women aren’t as weak as society portrays them, which other woman were too timid to do so.  In Sojourner’s speech “And ain’t I a woman?” she mentions that when she was a slave she did the same amount of labor a man would do and how she performed even better than most of them. Now by Davis stating that Sojourner restates “And ain’t I a woman?”, is Sojourner stating that she is a woman and she was as capable of doing labor that was intended for men and she managed to do even better.  Not only was she fighting for the rights of blacks but also for the rights of women as a whole.