Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis

Author:Angela Y. Davis [Davis, Angela Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79849-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

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In January, 1868, when Susan B. Anthony published the first issue of Revolution, working women, whose ranks in the labor force had recently expanded, had begun to defend their rights conspicuously. During the Civil War more white women than ever before had gone to work outside their homes. In 1870, while 70 percent of women workers were domestics, one-fourth of all nonfarm workers in general were female.1 Within the garment industry, they had already become the majority. At this time the labor movement was a rapidly expanding economic force, comprising no less than thirty nationally organized unions.2

Inside the labor movement, however, the influence of male supremacy was so powerful that only the Cigarmakers and Printers had opened their doors to women. But some women workers had attempted to organize themselves. During the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, the sewing women constituted the largest group of women working outside their homes. When they began to organize, the spirit of unionization spread from New York to Boston and Philadelphia and to all the major cities where the garment industry flourished. When the National Labor Union was founded in 1866, its delegates were compelled to acknowledge the sewing women’s efforts. At the initiative of

William Sylvis, the convention resolved to support not only the “daughters of toil in the land”3—as the sewing women were called—but the general unionization of women and their full equality with respect to wages.4 When the National Labor Union reconvened in 1868, electing Sylvis as their president, the presence of several women among the delegates, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, compelled the convention to pass stronger resolutions and generally treat the cause of working women’s rights with greater seriousness than before.

Women were welcomed at the 1869 founding convention of the National Colored Labor Union. As the Black workers explained in one resolution, they did not want to commit “the mistakes heretofore made by our white fellow citizens in omitting women.”5 This Black labor organization, created because of the exclusionary policies of white labor groups, proved by its practice to be more seriously committed to working women’s rights than its white counterpart and predecessor. While the NLU had simply passed resolutions supporting women’s equality, the NCLU actually elected a woman—Mary S. Carey6—to serve on the organization’s policymaking executive committee. Susati B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not record any acknowledgment of the Black labor organization’s anti-sexist accomplishments. They were probably too absorbed in the suffrage battle to take note of that important development.

In the first issue of Anthony’s Revolution, the newspaper financed by the racist Democrat George Francis Train, the overall message was that women should seek the ballot. Once the reality of woman suffrage was established, so the paper seemed to say, it would be the millennium for women—and the final triumph of morality for the nation as a whole.

We shall show that the ballot will secure for woman equal place and equal wages in the world of work; that it will

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