Angela Davis

Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of individualism. Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history.

progress includes a great deal more than what is generally meant by the terms culture, education and contact.

During the Civil War more white women than ever before had gone to work outside their homes. In 1870, while 70 percent of women workers were domestics, one-fourth of all nonfarm workers in general were female.1 Within the garment industry, they had already become the majority. At this time the labor movement was a rapidly expanding economic force, comprising no less than thirty nationally organized unions.2

Inside the labor movement, however, the influence of male supremacy was so powerful that only the Cigarmakers and Printers had opened their doors to women.

Susati B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not record any acknowledgment of the Black labor organization’s anti-sexist accomplishments. They were probably too absorbed in the suffrage battle to take note of that important development.

Though its vision was often too narrowly focused on the ballot, Revolution played an important role in the struggles of working women during the two years it was published.

Although Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their colleagues on the paper made important contributions to the cause of working women, they never really accepted the principle of trade unionism.

As Anthony and Stanton attacked Black men when they realized that the ex-slaves might receive the vote before white women, so they lashed out in a parallel fashion against the men of the working class.

Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage.