Women, Race & Class was published by Random House in 1981. The book is Davis’s most influential scholarly work and one of the foundational texts of what would later be called intersectional analysis — the recognition that race, gender, and class are not separate axes of oppression but interlocking systems that cannot be understood in isolation.
Davis traces the interconnection through American history. The abolition movement of the nineteenth century produced the first organized women’s rights movement — but when the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men without enfranchising women, white suffragists (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) responded with racist arguments, claiming that educated white women were more deserving of the vote than illiterate Black men. The suffrage movement split along racial lines and never fully reunited.
Davis’s analysis of the “myth of the Black rapist” — the claim, central to the ideology of lynching, that Black men were a sexual threat to white women — shows how this myth served multiple purposes simultaneously: it justified white supremacist violence, it controlled Black men through terror, and it controlled white women by positioning them as property requiring protection. The chapter on reproductive rights demonstrates that the birth control movement, led by Margaret Sanger, was intertwined with eugenics — the desire to limit the reproduction of “unfit” populations, which in practice meant poor people and people of color.
The book’s arguments have become so widely adopted that they may seem obvious to contemporary readers, but in 1981 they were genuinely revolutionary: Davis was challenging both the mainstream feminist movement (which treated gender as the primary oppression) and the Black liberation movement (which treated race as primary) by insisting that neither could be understood without the other, and that both were inseparable from class.
Collecting Women, Race & Class
First edition (Random House, New York, 1981): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75