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Leftist Reading: Women, Race & Class, Part 1
This week is our first reading of Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis.
The full book is available online here:
https://archive.org/details/WomenRaceClassAngelaDavis
Content warnings for this episode as a whole:
Slavery
Pregnancy
Rape
Death
Torture
Racism
Blood
And abuse related to multiple of the above topics.
[Part 1 – This Week]
1. THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY: STANDARDS FOR A NEW WOMANHOOD
First half – 01:32
[Part 2]
1. THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY: STANDARDS FOR A NEW WOMANHOOD (Second half)
[Part 3]
2. THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT AND THE BIRTH OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS
[Part 4 - 5]
3. CLASS AND RACE IN THE EARLY WOMEN’S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
[Part 6]
4. RACISM IN THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
[Part 7]
5. THE MEANING OF EMANCIPATION ACCORDING TO BLACK WOMEN
[Part 8]
6. EDUCATION AND LIBERATION: BLACK WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVE
[Part 9]
7. WOMAN SUFFRAGE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: THE RISING INFLUENCE OF RACISM
[Part 10]
8. BLACK WOMEN AND THE CLUB MOVEMENT
[Part 11]
9. WORKING WOMEN, BLACK WOMEN AND THE HISTORY OF THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
[Part 12 - 13]
10. COMMUNIST WOMEN
[Part 14 - 15]
11. RAPE, RACISM AND THE MYTH OF THE BLACK RAPIST
[Part 16 - 17]
12. RACISM, BIRTH CONTROL AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
[Part 18-19]
13. THE APPROACHING OBSOLESCENCE OF HOUSEWORK: A WORKING-CLASS PERSPECTIVE
Footnotes:
1) – 01:54
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1918). See also Phillips’ article “The Plantation as a Civilizing Factor,” Sewanee Review, XII (July, 1904), reprinted in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). The following passage is included in this article:
The conditions of our problem are as follows:
1. A century or two ago the negroes were savages in the wilds of Africa. 2. Those who were brought to America, and their descendants, have acquired a certain amount of civilization, and are now in some degree fitted for life in modern civilized society. 3. This progress of the negroes has been in very large measure the result of their association with civilized white people. 4. An immense mass of the negroes is sure to remain for an indefinite period in the midst of a civilized white nation. The problem is, How can we best provide for their peaceful residence and their further progress in this nation of white men and how can we best guard against their lapsing back into barbarism? As a possible solution for a large part of the problem, I suggest the plantation system. (p. 83)
2) – 02:41
Observations on the special predicament of Black women slaves can be found in numerous books, articles and anthologies authored and edited by Herbert Aptheker, including American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1970. First edition: 1948); To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History (New York: International Publishers, 1969. First edition: 1948); A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vol. 1 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1969. First edition: 1951). In February, 1948, Aptheker published an article entitled “The Negro Woman” in Masses and Mainstream, Vol. 11, No. 2.
3) – 02:54
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books,1974).
4) – 02:59
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South(London and NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1972).
5) – 03:06
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South, 2 volumes. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974.)
6) – 03:12
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976)
7) – 03:23
Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, third edition, revised (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
8) – 04:16
See Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington, D.C.: U.S.Department of Labor, 1965. Reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).
9) – 05:53
See W. E. B. DuBois, “The Damnation of Women,” Chapter VII of Darkwater (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).
10) – 06:44
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: VintageBooks, 1956), p. 343.
11) – 07:57
Ibid., p. 31; p. 49; p. 50; p. 60.
12) – 08:55
Mel Watkins and Jay David, editors, To Be a Black Woman: Portraits in Fact and Fiction (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1970), p. 16. Quoted from Benjamin A. Botkin, editor, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).
13) – 11:30
Barbara Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 109.
14) – 13:21
Ibid., p. 111. Quoted from Lewis Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons ofa Soldier of the Revolution (Boston: 1846), p. 127.
15) – 13:49
Stampp, op. cit., p. 57.
16) – 14:44
Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Lewistown, Pa.: J. W. Shugert, 1836), pp. 150–151. Quoted in Gerda Lerner, editor, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 48.
17) – 15:30
Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy: Late a Slave in the United States of America (Boston: 1844), p. 18. Quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. First edition: 1939).
18) – 16:19
Ibid.
19) – 17:00
Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 165ff.
20) – 17:26
Ibid., pp. 164–165
21) – 17:43
Ibid., p. 165.
22) – 17:54
Ibid., pp. 165–166.
23) – 18:02
“Iron works and mines also directed slave women and children to lug trams and to push lumps ofore into crushers and furnaces.” Ibid., p. 166.
24) – 18:32
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band (Berlin, D.D.R.: Dietz Verlag, 1965), pp. 415–416: “In England werden gelegentlich statt der Pferde immer noch Weiber zum Ziehnusw. bei den Kanalbooten verwandt, weil die zur Produktion von Pferden und Maschinen erheischte Arbeit ein mathematisch gegebenes Quantum, die zur Erhaltung von Weibern der Surplus-populationdagegen unter aller Berechnung steht.” Translation: Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 391.
25) – 18:53
Starobin, op. cit., p. 166: “Slaveowners used women and children in several ways in order to increase the competitiveness of southern products. First, slave women and children cost less to capitalize and to maintain than prime males. John Ewing Calhoun, a South Carolina textile manufacturer, estimated that slave children cost two-thirds as much to maintain as adult slave cottonmillers. Another Carolinian estimated that the difference in cost between female and male slave labor was even greater than that between slave and free labor. Evidence from businesses using slave womenand children supports the conclusion that they could reduce labor costs substantially.”
26) – 19:49
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: 1860), pp. 14–15. Quoted in Stampp, op. cit., p. 34.
27) – 20:15
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin, D.D.R.: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p.266. “Die Arbeit ist das lebendige, gestaltende Feuer; die Vergänglichkeit der Dinge, ihre Zeitlichkeit,als ihre Formung durch die lebendige Zeit.”
28) – 23:48
Quoted in Robert Staples, editor, The Black Family: Essays and Studies (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971), p. 37. See also John Bracey, Jr., August Meier, Elliott Rudwick,
editors, Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971),p. 140.
29) – 24:30
Bracey et al., op. cit., p. 81. Lee Rainwater’s article “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family” was originally published in Daedalus, Vol. XCV (Winter, 1966), pp. 172–216.
30) – 25:05
Ibid., p. 98.
31) – 25:31
Ibid
32) – 25:50
Frazier, op. Cit.
33) – 25:31
Ibid., p. 102
34) – 26:50
Gutman, op. Cit.
35) – 27:45
The first chapter of his book is entitled “Send Me Some of the Children’s Hair,” a plea made by a slave husband in a letter to his wife from whom he had been forcibly separated by sale: “Send me some of the children’s hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper.... The woman is not born that feels as near to me as you do. You feel this day like myself. Tell them they must remember they have a good father and one that cares for them and one that thinks about them every day.... Laura I do love you the same. My love to you never have failed. Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry, that I am. You feels and seems to me as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura.You know my treatment to a wife and you know how I am about my children. You know I am one man that do love my children.” (pp. 6–7)
36) – 28:16
Ibid. See Chapters 3 and 4.
37) – 29:20
Ibid., pp. 356–357.
38) – 30:31
Elkins, op. cit., p. 130.
39) – 31:22
Stampp, op. cit., p. 344.
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4.4
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This week is our first reading of Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis.
The full book is available online here:
https://archive.org/details/WomenRaceClassAngelaDavis
Content warnings for this episode as a whole:
Slavery
Pregnancy
Rape
Death
Torture
Racism
Blood
And abuse related to multiple of the above topics.
[Part 1 – This Week]
1. THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY: STANDARDS FOR A NEW WOMANHOOD
First half – 01:32
[Part 2]
1. THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY: STANDARDS FOR A NEW WOMANHOOD (Second half)
[Part 3]
2. THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT AND THE BIRTH OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS
[Part 4 - 5]
3. CLASS AND RACE IN THE EARLY WOMEN’S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
[Part 6]
4. RACISM IN THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
[Part 7]
5. THE MEANING OF EMANCIPATION ACCORDING TO BLACK WOMEN
[Part 8]
6. EDUCATION AND LIBERATION: BLACK WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVE
[Part 9]
7. WOMAN SUFFRAGE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: THE RISING INFLUENCE OF RACISM
[Part 10]
8. BLACK WOMEN AND THE CLUB MOVEMENT
[Part 11]
9. WORKING WOMEN, BLACK WOMEN AND THE HISTORY OF THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
[Part 12 - 13]
10. COMMUNIST WOMEN
[Part 14 - 15]
11. RAPE, RACISM AND THE MYTH OF THE BLACK RAPIST
[Part 16 - 17]
12. RACISM, BIRTH CONTROL AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
[Part 18-19]
13. THE APPROACHING OBSOLESCENCE OF HOUSEWORK: A WORKING-CLASS PERSPECTIVE
Footnotes:
1) – 01:54
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1918). See also Phillips’ article “The Plantation as a Civilizing Factor,” Sewanee Review, XII (July, 1904), reprinted in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). The following passage is included in this article:
The conditions of our problem are as follows:
1. A century or two ago the negroes were savages in the wilds of Africa. 2. Those who were brought to America, and their descendants, have acquired a certain amount of civilization, and are now in some degree fitted for life in modern civilized society. 3. This progress of the negroes has been in very large measure the result of their association with civilized white people. 4. An immense mass of the negroes is sure to remain for an indefinite period in the midst of a civilized white nation. The problem is, How can we best provide for their peaceful residence and their further progress in this nation of white men and how can we best guard against their lapsing back into barbarism? As a possible solution for a large part of the problem, I suggest the plantation system. (p. 83)
2) – 02:41
Observations on the special predicament of Black women slaves can be found in numerous books, articles and anthologies authored and edited by Herbert Aptheker, including American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1970. First edition: 1948); To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History (New York: International Publishers, 1969. First edition: 1948); A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vol. 1 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1969. First edition: 1951). In February, 1948, Aptheker published an article entitled “The Negro Woman” in Masses and Mainstream, Vol. 11, No. 2.
3) – 02:54
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books,1974).
4) – 02:59
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South(London and NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1972).
5) – 03:06
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South, 2 volumes. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974.)
6) – 03:12
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976)
7) – 03:23
Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, third edition, revised (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
8) – 04:16
See Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington, D.C.: U.S.Department of Labor, 1965. Reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).
9) – 05:53
See W. E. B. DuBois, “The Damnation of Women,” Chapter VII of Darkwater (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).
10) – 06:44
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: VintageBooks, 1956), p. 343.
11) – 07:57
Ibid., p. 31; p. 49; p. 50; p. 60.
12) – 08:55
Mel Watkins and Jay David, editors, To Be a Black Woman: Portraits in Fact and Fiction (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1970), p. 16. Quoted from Benjamin A. Botkin, editor, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).
13) – 11:30
Barbara Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 109.
14) – 13:21
Ibid., p. 111. Quoted from Lewis Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons ofa Soldier of the Revolution (Boston: 1846), p. 127.
15) – 13:49
Stampp, op. cit., p. 57.
16) – 14:44
Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Lewistown, Pa.: J. W. Shugert, 1836), pp. 150–151. Quoted in Gerda Lerner, editor, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 48.
17) – 15:30
Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy: Late a Slave in the United States of America (Boston: 1844), p. 18. Quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. First edition: 1939).
18) – 16:19
Ibid.
19) – 17:00
Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 165ff.
20) – 17:26
Ibid., pp. 164–165
21) – 17:43
Ibid., p. 165.
22) – 17:54
Ibid., pp. 165–166.
23) – 18:02
“Iron works and mines also directed slave women and children to lug trams and to push lumps ofore into crushers and furnaces.” Ibid., p. 166.
24) – 18:32
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band (Berlin, D.D.R.: Dietz Verlag, 1965), pp. 415–416: “In England werden gelegentlich statt der Pferde immer noch Weiber zum Ziehnusw. bei den Kanalbooten verwandt, weil die zur Produktion von Pferden und Maschinen erheischte Arbeit ein mathematisch gegebenes Quantum, die zur Erhaltung von Weibern der Surplus-populationdagegen unter aller Berechnung steht.” Translation: Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 391.
25) – 18:53
Starobin, op. cit., p. 166: “Slaveowners used women and children in several ways in order to increase the competitiveness of southern products. First, slave women and children cost less to capitalize and to maintain than prime males. John Ewing Calhoun, a South Carolina textile manufacturer, estimated that slave children cost two-thirds as much to maintain as adult slave cottonmillers. Another Carolinian estimated that the difference in cost between female and male slave labor was even greater than that between slave and free labor. Evidence from businesses using slave womenand children supports the conclusion that they could reduce labor costs substantially.”
26) – 19:49
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: 1860), pp. 14–15. Quoted in Stampp, op. cit., p. 34.
27) – 20:15
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin, D.D.R.: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p.266. “Die Arbeit ist das lebendige, gestaltende Feuer; die Vergänglichkeit der Dinge, ihre Zeitlichkeit,als ihre Formung durch die lebendige Zeit.”
28) – 23:48
Quoted in Robert Staples, editor, The Black Family: Essays and Studies (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971), p. 37. See also John Bracey, Jr., August Meier, Elliott Rudwick,
editors, Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971),p. 140.
29) – 24:30
Bracey et al., op. cit., p. 81. Lee Rainwater’s article “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family” was originally published in Daedalus, Vol. XCV (Winter, 1966), pp. 172–216.
30) – 25:05
Ibid., p. 98.
31) – 25:31
Ibid
32) – 25:50
Frazier, op. Cit.
33) – 25:31
Ibid., p. 102
34) – 26:50
Gutman, op. Cit.
35) – 27:45
The first chapter of his book is entitled “Send Me Some of the Children’s Hair,” a plea made by a slave husband in a letter to his wife from whom he had been forcibly separated by sale: “Send me some of the children’s hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper.... The woman is not born that feels as near to me as you do. You feel this day like myself. Tell them they must remember they have a good father and one that cares for them and one that thinks about them every day.... Laura I do love you the same. My love to you never have failed. Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry, that I am. You feels and seems to me as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura.You know my treatment to a wife and you know how I am about my children. You know I am one man that do love my children.” (pp. 6–7)
36) – 28:16
Ibid. See Chapters 3 and 4.
37) – 29:20
Ibid., pp. 356–357.
38) – 30:31
Elkins, op. cit., p. 130.
39) – 31:22
Stampp, op. cit., p. 344.