Activity

For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized,…

Housework, Gilman insists, vitiates women’s humanity:

Working-class men, whatever their color, can be motivated to rape by the belief that their maleness accords them the privilege to dominate women. Yet since they do not possess the social or economic authority—unless it is a white man raping a woman of color—guaranteeing them immunity from prosecuti…

With the emancipation of the slaves, Black people no longer possessed a market value for the former slaveholders, and “… the lynching industry was revolutionized.”33 When Ida B. Wells researched her first pamphlet against lynching, published in 1895 under the title A Red Record, she calculated that…

Now, so Leonora O’Reilly and her working-class sisters proclaimed, they were going to fight for the ballot—and indeed they would use it as a weapon to remove all those legislators from office whose loyalties were with big business. Working-class women demanded the right to suffrage as an arm to ass…