Two Reviews of Angela Davis

Two Reviews of Angela Davis’ Women Race and Class (1983) By: Brittany Turnbull I. The Reviews a. Amy Winter [Women Race and Class] Off Our Backs, January-February Issue (2005) pp48-49 b. Ann Russo [Book Review]Women Studies International Forum, Volume 6, Number 2 (1983) pp249 II. Summary of Reviews a. Winter, Off Our Backs The reviewer focused on the different parts of history of the African American woman as well as the history of all women as a whole. She broke up the review by discussing each chapter to coincide with Davis’ break up of her book and focused on the important details of each chapter that she found Davis had brought out. Winter doesn’t offer much opinion within her review because she mainly sticks to the fact that the book is written about oppression of African American women and African American people and she mainly describes exactly what Davis wrote. However, Winter did offer some criticism when Davis had written about how women working in the factories and doing hard labor was more interesting than doing house work. Winter found that there was no difference because either way something needed to be cleaned. One just reaped the benefits of a paycheck while the other did not. This was a good and thorough review because not only did it look at the whole book but it looked at each individual chapter and the main points within each chapter. b. Russo, Women Studies International Forum There is a different approach to this review because it is basically an analysis of what Davis’ theme or overall meaning of the book was. Russo described the book in the sense that the book wasn’t about oppression of Black women or Black people. It was about comparing the Black women to White women the overall sexist oppression that they both had to overcome and still are overcoming. Russo described this book as a being a feminist book about feminism as a whole and the revolution of all women. There was no discussion about the history of oppression that Black women had to live with over time or anything along those lines. There was not mention of historical figures as well. This review was good in the sense that it was an analysis of the overall idea of the book, however I feel that Russo was completely wrong in her analysis. She failed to realize the exact struggles and the exact differences between White and Black women. She also failed to realize that the use of White women within the text was to compare how much more difficult Black women had had it over White women in terms of the sexual and racial discrimination that Black women have had to encounter and attempt to overcome throughout history.