The first women’s rights activists in America fought for the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to keep their own wages. They won some of these fights. They mattered.
But they made a choice.
When Black women asked for the same rights, the white women leading the movement had to choose: stand with all women, or stand with white supremacy. Angela Davis shows how this happened in Women, Race and Class (1981). The first feminists didn’t accidentally exclude Black women. They actively worked to exclude them. They formed alliances with segregationists. They distanced themselves from Black women’s struggles. They told a story of “woman” that only made sense if you were white, only made sense if your oppression was only gendered.
What that choice produced
The suffrage movement under Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony explicitly argued, in the years after the Civil War, that educated white women were more deserving of the vote than freed Black men. When the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified giving Black men the vote while women remained excluded, parts of the movement responded with explicitly racist politics — arguing that it was an outrage that Black men had the vote while refined white women did not. They chose the racial hierarchy over cross-racial solidarity.
This was not ignorance. Frederick Douglass, who had been an ally of the women’s movement for decades, broke with it over exactly this question. Sojourner Truth had asked, a generation earlier, “Ain’t I a Woman?” — pointing out that the category “woman” in the movement’s analysis described only a specific, privileged version of womanhood. The movement heard this and chose its position anyway.
The result was a suffrage movement that secured voting rights for women — which in the South, due to Jim Crow laws, meant effectively white women — while continuing to exclude Black women through the same mechanisms that excluded Black men. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Most Black women in the South couldn’t vote until 1965.
The reproductive question
The narrowness of the category recurs in the twentieth century in the reproductive rights movement. The right to abortion has always been framed, in mainstream feminist politics, as the right not to be forced to have a child. That framing reflects the specific experience of women whose reproductive freedom was constrained by unwanted pregnancy and the unavailability of abortion.
But Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, and poor women faced a different reproductive problem with equal frequency: not the state forcing unwanted pregnancy, but the state preventing wanted pregnancy. Forced sterilization. Coerced long-acting contraception. The threat of losing children to child welfare systems as punishment for poverty. The specific violence of medical racism — the long history of Black women’s bodies being used as medical research subjects without consent, going back to J. Marion Sims’s experimental gynecological surgeries on enslaved women in the 1840s.
Reproductive justice — the framework developed by Black women activists in the 1990s, most prominently Loretta Ross and the organization SisterSong — insists on the right not just not to have children but to have children and to raise them in safe and supportive communities. This is a different framework, produced by a different experience, and it challenges the mainstream movement to account for the women it had been leaving out.
Davis’s argument is structural: the story gets told the way it does because of whose experience it starts from, and whose experience gets excluded is not random. The women most often left out are the ones whose labor is most essential and most exploited — whose inclusion would require the movement to confront not just gender but race and class.
The same choice, over and over
This isn’t ancient history. The same choice recurs. A movement for “women’s” rights that turns out to mean white women. A conversation about reproductive freedom that doesn’t include women whose reproduction has been controlled by the state. A story about women in the workplace that doesn’t include the women doing the worst-paid, most invisible work.
The labor movement’s history runs a parallel track. Trade unions that organized white workers and excluded Black workers. A solidarity that was selective, a commons that had walls.
The lesson is not that solidarity is impossible. It is that solidarity requires actively confronting the structures that divide the people it aims to unite. The movement that refuses to confront race, that builds the category “woman” on the exclusion of Black women, is not building solidarity. It is building a narrower version of the system it claims to oppose — one that redistributes power within the existing hierarchy rather than challenging the hierarchy itself.
Genuine solidarity — the kind that builds something that actually threatens the system of extraction — requires starting from the most excluded, not from the most advantaged. The commons that includes everyone requires confronting the structures that made some people outside the human to begin with.