The Legacy of Slavery. By Angela Y. Davis.

When the tentative pre-Civil War forays into factory work gave way to an aggressive embrace of industrialization in the United States, it robbed many white women of the experience of performing productive labor. Their spinning wheels were rendered obsolete by the textile factories. Their candlemaking paraphernalia became museum pieces like so many of the other tools which had previously assisted them to produce the articles required by their families for survival.

As the ideology of femininity - a by-product of industrialization - was popularized and disseminated through the new ladies' magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work. The cleavage between the home and the public economy, brought on by industrial capitalism, established female inferiority more firmly than ever before. "Woman" became synonoymous in the prevailing propaganda with "mother" and "housewife", and both "mother" and "housewife" bore tha fatal mark of inferiority.

But among Black female slaves, this vocabulary was nowhere to be found. The economic arrangements of slavery contradicted the hierarchical sexual roles incorporated in the new ideology. Male-female relations within the slave community could not, therefore, confirm to the dominant idiological patterns (Davis, 1981:9)

Most scholarly studies have interpreted slave family life as elevating the women and debasing the men, even when both mother and father were present. (...)

It is true that domestic life took on an exaggerated importance in the social lives of slaves, for it did indeed provide them with the only space where they could truly experience themselves as human beings. Black women, for this reason - and also because they were workers just like their men - were not debased by their domestic functions in the way white women came to be. Unlike their white counterparts, they could never be treated as mere "housewives". But to go further and maintain that they consequently dominated their men is to fundamentally distort the reality of slave life. (ibid.:13)

- Davis, A. Y.  (1981). Women, Race & Class. Penguin Books, 12th edition
- photographs of Angela Davis (East Berlin, 1973) via