Women, Culture & Politics was published by Random House in 1989. The collection gathers Davis’s speeches and essays from the 1980s — a decade in which the political landscape shifted dramatically to the right under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and in which many of the gains of the civil rights and feminist movements were under systematic attack.
Davis addresses the Reagan-era rollback on multiple fronts: the gutting of social welfare programs (which disproportionately affected women and communities of color), the War on Drugs (which she identifies as a new mechanism for criminalizing Black communities), the persistence of apartheid in South Africa (and American complicity with the Pretoria regime), and the feminization of poverty (the growing concentration of poverty among single mothers, particularly Black and Latina women).
The essays extend the intersectional analysis of Women, Race & Class into specific policy areas: Davis examines how welfare policy, criminal justice policy, and foreign policy all reflect the same interlocking structures of race, gender, and class domination. Her insistence that feminism must address economic inequality — not merely legal equality or cultural representation — distinguishes her work from liberal feminism and positions it within the socialist-feminist tradition.
Collecting Women, Culture & Politics
First edition (Random House, New York, 1989): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$30