BOOK REVIEW 67 Here the power of degradation that is possessed by an exploitative system with its idelogical adjuncts is obviously underestimated by Davis. This degradation must have been operative for the white woman worker in different ways. But Davis seems to think of militancy as the automatic characteristic of the labouring poor and therefore of the black female slave as well* Again, what happened after the slave woman was emancipated ? Did she retain the "new standards of womanhood" intact ? Or were there new threats within capitalism to the integrity other family life ? Davis is quite right to challenge the pernicious racist-sexist Moynihan thesis which says that the destruction of male authority within the negro 'family during the period of slavery, and its being forced into a "matriarchal structure" created a "tangle of pathology" which makes the American Negro a socially disoriented figure even today. She thoroughly exposes the kind of ideological nonsense which goes by the name of 'erudite research' and which reinforces the foundations of oppression it seeks to gloze over She makes a scorching analysis of the tendency to push the phenomenon of racial oppression and its destructive effect back to the bygone days of slavery. But, on the other hand, even if we completely accept Davis' own thesis that the Negro family in slavery resisted wherever it could the disintegration enforced upon it by developing its own distinctive set of domestic values based on sexual equality, it does not follow from this that the situation would remain unchanged after the transition from slavery to proletarianisation. We find capitalism constantly encroaching upon the private life of the worker and seeking to degrade it in the process. Has the Negro family been able to resist this onslaught in the post-slavery period? Or has it gone through a process of degeneration similar to other groups within the working class? If there is any truth at all in the theory that the male in the black working class family today is often a drifter and it is the woman who has to bear the burden of housework and child-rearing while constituting part of the labour-force herself, this is a specific manifestation of the anomaly within capitalism to which analogues may be found among other wolking class families, and forms of resistence to it cannot be identical with those adopted by the slave-family to resist disintegration. How a situation of continued racial discrimintion may, in fact, retard the development of working class consciousness not only among whites but also among blacks in the post-slavery period is not underlined sufficiently by Davis. There are, of course, forms of racial oppression which cut across class barriers Movements for negro suffrage in the years following the Civil War, movements against widespread lynchings of blacks after their emancipation, movements against various forms of segregation ism concerned all back people. Tlie black women who were in the position of leadership in these movements mostly belonged to that minority who had succeeded in making at least some use of the opportunities of