Racial Ethnic Women's Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression

Abstract

A colonial labor system and other forms of racial oppression shaped the productive and reproductive labor of racial ethnic women in ways that made their experiences fundamentally different from those underlying the construction of feminist analyses of women's oppression. For black, Mexican-American and Chinese-American women, key concepts such as the private-public dichotomy, gender conflict within the family and the division of reproductive labor need to be reformulated. This study examines the historical evidence on black, Mexican-American and Chinese-American women's work from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in light of contemporary Marxist-feminist and colonial labor system theories. Thus, the author begins to reformulate and synthesize key concepts in these contemporary theories to explain the experiences of racial ethnic women.