Women, Race & Class

Davis focuses on racism’s influence on the birth control and reproductive rights movements. 19th-century feminists developed the idea of “voluntary motherhood” out of a desire for lives outside the home and a wish to avoid the burden of numerous pregnancies. With this idea, the birth control movement got its start, but it struggled to unite all classes of women in support of it.

When the white birth rate dropped toward the end of the 19th century—a time of rising racial violence, riots, and US imperialism—the response was racist and anti-working class. “Race suicide” was the prevailing term used, including in speeches by President Teddy Roosevelt, to describe the perceived threat of falling white birth rates. Consequently, some birth control advocates targeted “inferior” populations: poor people, Black people, and immigrants. Birth control thus became a solution to race suicide and a means by which affluent white people could maintain their population. Davis explains that poor women and women of color were said to have a “duty” to limit the number of children even as white middle and upper-class women had a “right” to do the same.

Davis details the life of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. When Sanger cut ties with the Socialist Party, she and other birth control advocates began to accept the anti-Black and anti-immigrant propaganda of the eugenics movement. Davis explains that the eugenics movement was a perfect means for monopoly capitalists to justify their increased exploitation of Black and immigrant workers throughout the country. By 1932, eugenics-influenced compulsory sterilization laws existed in more than 26 states, with thousands of people deemed “unfit” already having been sterilized—a campaign Sanger supported. In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America developed a project targeting Black people for birth control propaganda. Davis asserts that the eugenics movement and its “racist strategy of population control” in this way “robbed” birth control of its potential progressivism.

he 20th-century abortion rights campaign also did not include large numbers of women of color. Davis argues that the reasons for their absence lay in the birth control movement’s problematic history— specifically, the movement’s association with racist involuntary sterilization. Changes toward the end of the 1970s, such as the 1977 Hyde Amendment withdrawing federal funding for abortions, channeled more poor women and women of color into sterilization procedures, which remained free. Infamous sterilization abuse cases like that of the Relf sisters brought further light to the issue, which was occurring with the support of federal funds. Statistical comparisons show that the US might have funded 100,000-200,000 sterilizations in 1972 alone (during the entire reign of Nazi Germany, approximately 250,000 sterilizations were conducted). Davis states that Native American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Black women remain disproportionate targets of sterilization and lead the movement against sterilization abuse—a movement that has not been embraced by middle-class white women, who often cannot access sterilization even if they want it. As Davis notes, this differing treatment reflects the desire to maintain white racial supremacy.

Nevertheless, abortion rights activists have largely failed to understand why many Black women associate birth control with genocide and demand an end to sterilization abuse. Women of color understand the urgency of abortion rights all too well: When they seek abortions, it is generally because horrible social conditions discourage them from having children, just as enslaved women self-administered abortions out of desperation to prevent children being born into slavery. These working-class women wanted the right to abortion but also a change in the social conditions that often force them to seek abortion. Early abortion rights activists assumed the right to abortions would reduce poverty as if it would address issues such as low wages. Davis argues they should have made themselves familiar with the racist history of the birth control movement to understand why women of color and working-class women might be reluctant to support it.

Davis explores the oppressive nature of housework and employs a Marxist lens to its potential obsolescence. Davis cites Frederick Engels’s argument that sexual inequality arose from private property; in early human history men and women conducted equally necessary economic tasks. She witnessed this firsthand among the Masai people in Tanzania, who have a pre-capitalist economy in which women have a social status equal to men. Similarly, the pre-industrial economy of the colonial United States allowed women to be productive workers in a home-based economy, doing tasks that are today considered typical housework. With industrialization, however, goods became valuable based on their ability to generate profit for an employer. Essentially, housework’s "unprofitability” to the capitalist economy made it inferior to wage labor, and thus, the housewife was born. The roles of housewife and mother became “universal models of womanhood” in capitalist societies (229), with housewives stamped as inferior.

In reality, there were millions of enslaved women doing forced work in the South and working-class immigrant women employed in Northern factories, so the “housewife” was only a reality for middle-class families. Working-class women were viewed as operating outside of their prescribed gender roles and as a result were treated (and paid) less than male workers. This sexism maximized profits for capitalists. Similarly, Black women have always worked outside the home. While they “escaped the psychological damage industrial capitalism inflicted in white middle-class housewives'' by indoctrinating weakness and submissiveness, they had to bear “the double burden of wage labor and housework” (231).

Consequently, Davis believes socialized housework is the key to women’s liberation, especially for working-class women, Black and white, who more desperately need to be freed from its burden. She identifies this potential of housework to be industrialized or socialized as a “closely guarded secret of advanced capitalist societies” (223). She envisions teams of well-paid workers using advanced machinery to quickly perform housework but argues that this is not a reality because capitalism is hostile to anything with little profit potential.

Instead, the technological state of housework remains the same and takes hours and hours of time. Davis believes neither women nor men should have to waste hours on housework that by nature is oppressive. Davis also criticizes the argument of the Wages for Housework Movement (WHM) that paying wages for housework would liberate women. This argument’s premise is that housewives create labor power for employers because their housework allows family members to work for wages and that for that reason, they should be paid. Davis instead argues that the structural separation between the home economy and the capitalist economy means that housework acts as a “precondition” to capitalist production, not a part of it: Capitalist production requires preexisting workers to exploit, but women’s domestic labor is not the only means of generating this pool of laborers.

Davis observes that women on welfare typically call for a guaranteed annual income, affordable childcare, and adequate wages at their jobs rather than wages for housework. Davis also cites the lives of existing domestic workers and maids, who do receive wages for housework but still struggle with miserable social conditions, as evidence that wages for housework would not really solve anything for women. Davis notes that more than 50% of US women work for a living, but many remain unemployed due to sexism that forced them into the housewife role. To better challenge the housewife role, Davis proposes demanding jobs for women on par with men and social services that would make it easier for women to work outside of their homes. WHM, however, discourages women from obtaining jobs based on the belief that “slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to the kitchen sink” (239). Again, Davis disagrees, arguing that while work under capitalism is cruel, it is where women have the potential to unite with others to challenge such conditions (and capitalism). Lastly, Davis rejects WHM’s arguments on the basis that wages wouldn’t solve the issue of discontent with the actual work itself. Davis concludes by reiterating her strategy that women’s liberation must come through socialism.