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Assignment 01: Jet King

Angela Davis begins Chapter 3, “Class and Race in the Women’s Rights Campaign”, with the events which inspired the Seneca Falls Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women who attempted to participate in the World Anti-slavery Convention of 1840, are dismissed by the men of the convention because of the fact they are women. Although most men participating refuse to allow them to join, several abolitionists refuse to participate as well in solidarity.

According to Davis, the Seneca Falls convention was organized by upper class white women, and therefore only reflected their struggles, which consisted of the controlling effects of marriage, as well as the exclusion from professional fields of work. Davis illustrates the large group of women that suffer the inequalities of womanhood, as well as being in the working class through her description of the mill women. Davis demonstrates how the Seneca Falls Convention excluded this large group of women, and how the convention itself was classist.

Davis uses the stories of Sojourner Truth as well as Charlotte Woodward to demonstrate that the heart of the women’s rights movement was in the hands of working class and black women, instead of the dignified white women who believed the struggles of womanhood to be mostly linked to marriage, and failed to see its relation to race or class. Charlotte Woodward, a glovemaker, attended the convention to fight for a fair wage, and to separate herself from the patriarchy that prevented her from becoming a professional.

This chapter furthers the notion that the credit for the Women’s Rights movement is almost always given to the white, upperclass women of the Seneca Falls Convention, rather than the hardworking textile workers and black women. This is a characteristic that I still witness today, through “white feminism”. Even today I can clearly see that white women take the face of feminism, despite the fact that women of color play a large role. The fact that the term “white feminism” exists shows the growing acknowledgment of the whitewashing of women of color’s struggles for equality and the lengths that they go to achieve their goals.