Those female slaves worked side by side with men, sabotaged slavery at every turn, Miss Davis says, sometimes even killed their own children to spare them servitude, and, ''passed on to their nominallyįree female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality - in short, a legacy spelling out standards for a new womanhood.'' She begins with a powerful account of slavery, reminding us that virtually all black women were, from the beginning, workers - and not ''Mammies''īut field hands. Her approach, through most of this ambitious volume, is historical. In '' Women, Race and Class'' she untangles some strands of that triple knot. It is like Angela Davis, who has never shied from impossible tasks, to try. T= HE notion that poor black women are triply oppressed - by class, race and sex - is by now a truism but the ragged course of those biases in the past and the points at which they converge today are not easily January 10, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article
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