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Danielle Edwards Assignment 1

In Chapter 3 of Women, Race, & Class, Davis discusses many historical figures and events that led to the rise of the Women’s Right’s movement and conventions. One of the conventions Davis focuses on is the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. She explains the interrelationship of race, class, and gender in regards to the agenda of this convention.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott decided to hold the convention to challenge the oppression of women in society. While Stanton thought the introduction of woman suffrage would be a great platform to lead into the discussion of equality for women, Mott thought this idea to be a little too radical for their time. Therefore, the main focus of the convention was the institution of marriage and the many confines and fortification it put around women. The women who attended the convention rallied for challenging the political, social, domestic and religious climate that oppressed them. Davis argued that while this convention served as a recognition of the dilemma of middle class white women, it totally disregarded the crisis and perplexity of the situation of working class white women and black women, collectively.
Davis introduced Charlotte Woodward – the only woman who attended the convention that was able to exercise her right to vote- to show how class played a role in the convention. Unlike the majority of the women who attended, Woodward was a working class woman whose motives were very different from her counterparts. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments were a list of demands for equality based on the struggles of middle classes white women, signed by the attendees. Woodward and the other working class women however, wanted instructions of how they can further improve their lives as workers. This was not one of the points of main focus until the end of the convention. This furthers Davis’s argument that the groundbreaking movements Stanton and Mott’s forerunners made were being overlooked, as Stanton and Mott moved the women’s liberation movement in their own direction.
Race plays into the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 because not one black woman was present. On top of that, the agenda didn’t even mention black women, which was surprising due to the prior contributions of black women to the cause. Two years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Sojourner Truth spoke at the National Convention on Women’s Rights. She was able to articulate an argument with incontestable logic, that annihilated the terrible misconception that female weakness was incompatible with the right to vote (Davis, 1981:66).
In this Chapter, Davis explains how the women’s rights movements had faults and weaknesses because the leaders, rather that focusing on how race and class affects the rights of all women, they tried to separate it into two different quantities. Davis explains that in an industrial capitalistic economy, social problems, such as the fight for women’s rights does affect economic interests. She says that it was a flaw on the part of the leaders of the women’s movement to think that slavery in the South, profiteering of workers in the North and social oppression of women were not methodically related (1981:71)