Skip to content

Expediency governed the slave-holders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles.

— Angela Davis

Another quote →

Topics

Slavery

More quotes by Angela Davis

We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.

Masked Racism (1998)

Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world

All Angela Davis quotes →

You may also like

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?

Abraham Lincoln

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Abraham Lincoln

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Angela Davis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.