Mary Ann Weathers, “An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force”

“An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force”
Mary Ann Weathers
[Originally published in No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation. Cambridge, Mass: Cell 16. vol. 1, no. 2 (Feb 1969)]

“Nobody can fight your battles for you; you have to do it yourself.” This will be the premise used for the time being for stating the case for Black women’s liberation, although certainly it is the least significant. Black women, at least the Black women I have come in contact with in the movement have been expounding all their energies in “liberating” Black men (if you yourself are not free, how can you “liberate” someone else?). Consequently, the movement has practically come to a standstill. Not entirely due however to wasted energies but, adhering to basic false concepts rather than revolutionary principles ant at this stage of the game we should understand that if if is not revolutionary it is false.

Selma James, “Sex, Race and Class”

“Sex, Race and Class”
Selma James, 1975. [PDF]

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.