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Davis Chapter 3

In Chapter 3 Davis guides the reader through the creation of the Women’s Movement. She does so by creating complex tapestry that weaves in issues of race, class and gender. In doing so she shows us the ways that all three are interconnected and most importantly how the struggle for the rights for women, black people and workers are all dependent on one another.

Davis explains that the women’s movement was born from the involvement of white northern women in abolitionist activism. Through this activism they realized they could assert themselves in the public sphere and were just as capable as men in leadership roles. In this we see the way white women’s struggle for rights was inextricably tied to the abolition of slavery. However, Davis notes that within the abolitionist movement there was widespread sexism which resulted in the silencing and exclusion of abolitionist women from public speaking. In 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London women were barred from speaking and forced to sit behind a curtain where they could quite literally be neither seen nor heard. Events like these inflamed abolitionist women who realized that in order to play a real role in anti-abolitionist movements they had to assert their rights as women. This sparked a need for a conversation on women’s rights which led for the case for women’s suffrage. In the Seneca Falls Convention the discussion of suffrage rights for women brought about opposition from many. Frederick Douglass a prominent black writer and activist stood with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and advocated for the full equality of women. This is significant because Davis is attempting to demonstrate how the Black Liberation movement stood with the fight for women’s rights.

However, Davis also notes that the Seneca Falls convention was not attended by a single Black woman. How could a convention proclaiming the need for women’s rights and equality, born from the abolitionist movement not include a single black women? The black women, who stands at the intersection of both racial and gender oppression, was forgotten. At a convention in Akon Ohio Sojourner Truth an ex-slave spoke passionately about this dual oppression when men claimed that women’s inherent weakness would not allow them to exercise suffrage if they were to gain it. Citing experiences as a slave she countered that she was in no way weak, carried the same loads slave men carried and was never afforded with the gentle treatment white women did. With this she proved that these ideologies were false and women were just as capable as men. The white women in the audience many of which sneered and worked to bar Truth from speaking in the first place now cheered her. This I think is an interesting show of the ways white women accept black women in their movements so far as they perform labor for them.

Along with being a white women’s party The Seneca Falls Convention was almost entirely one comprised of wealthy white women. The Seneca Falls Declaration did not mention nor recognize the thousands of working class women and girls for whom a women’s rights movement was not only ideology but survival. While the convention revolved around the oppression of wealthy women by their husbands, the denial of opportunities to pursue education and being denied access from political realms white working women in factories saw the cause for women’s liberation as something that was tied to their rights as workers. The conditions in the mills led to disease, terrible diets and exploitation something these women worked to resist. As the conditions worsened the daughters of farmers began to be replaced by immigrant women whom Davis explains had no land to fall back on and whose labor was their only means of survival. The women’s movement attempts to be radical failed because they were supportive of capitalism. William Loyd Garrison proved this with his vehement opposition of workers forming their own political parties. While they fought against slavery they did not rally against worker’s rights not realizing that the oppression of slaves and that of the working class derived from the same source: Capitalism. Once again women like Sojourner Truth represent the intersections of Race, Gender and Class. Black women who never enjoyed the comfort that married life gave wealthy white women had been laborers from the very beginning. In this way Black women faced oppression at every side. The Women’s movement did not recognize workers as tied to their liberation because it’s leaders were the wives of northern capitalist or were capitalist themselves. They were not inclined to bite the hand that fed them. Davis is able to show the connection between all these social struggles and allow us to reach the conclusion that the Grimke sisters made: Progress could only come from coalitions formed through the joining of Black, women, and worker’s liberation movements.