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Assignment 01

Angela Davis shares many insights about the early Women’s Rights Campaign in this chapter. She begins with the 1848 Convention at Seneca Falls because it was the first organized women’s rights convention to take place. Davis hones in on the convention’s importance and focus – the idea that marriage disables a woman’s independence (economically and mentally), and also notes the significance of the first controversial mention of women’s suffrage. However, Angela Davis goes on to talk about the problems with the Convention at Seneca Falls as well. The Convention brought up sentiments relating to only a small group of women. Not only did the Convention leave out working white women, it also left out black women — both enslaved and free.

Davis describes the work of other women within the movement to prove that the advocacy for women’s rights began much sooner than 1848 and included women from every class and race. She points out that single white women who worked in the textile mills suffered from sexism and oppression in their own ways. These women worked tireless hours in some of the most horrible working conditions and were not treated fairly. They fought for their rights with rallies and strikes years prior to the Seneca Falls Convention and yet were hardly mentioned.

Similar to working white women, black women began fighting for equal rights (especially education rights) long before the organized convention. Still, there was absolutely no mention of black women at the Convention at Seneca Falls, nor were any black women present. While Davis cannot understand this, since the very birth of the women’s rights movement came from abolitionism and anti-slavery sentiments, she admits this is not the first time black women were left out of the conversation. In fact, Davis sheds light on perhaps one of the biggest problems with the early women’s rights campaign – that the movement had “failed to promote a broad anti-racist consciousness”. Two years after the 1848 convention, Sojourner Truth prompted new ideas about equality, namely racism and sexism. She pleaded that black women deserved freedom from oppression just as much as white middle-class women.

Davis ends this chapter with the idea that the fight for equality was a triangular issue that should include women, blacks and labor in its agenda. Could there be equal women’s rights before complete abolitionism?