ABSTRACT
William Edward Burghardt DuBois "The Damnation of Women," published in 1920, takes up this challenge directly. For Du Bois, slavery is the crucible out which of American democracy will be forged; and it is slave women who bore the brunt of bondage and in whose daughters he discerns "the up-working of new revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land". "Damnation" is a work of reconstruction. Published nearly sixty years after the abolition of slavery, Darkwater—the book in which "Damnation" appears— stands apart from the main intellectual currents of its day for its insistence on the entanglement of the American present with the slave past. The chapter considers some of the ways that "Damnation" rewrites African American women's sexual, economic, and political history. "Damnation," finally, is a text that ought to trouble contemporary feminist theorists.
