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Zaggari in Beyond the Founders, Chapter 3 and 4 discusses women’s expanding social power based on entrepreneurship, but what he does not discuss, which is more evident in Slavery’s Capitalism by Becker and Rockman, is that women of color and white women were essentially used as tools. White women were tools for producing heirs and therefore had greater social importance than women of color, and women of color were used as tools that produced more slaves/workers: cogs for the machinery of the capitalist economy of the antebellum South. Through entrepreneurship, they became part of the labor class. They were creating a space for themselves that equaled no longer simply being tools. While the question of human inequality in the South led to the Civil War, changing the place in society for all slaves, and for men of color this meant political power was possible if not immediately available, it did not change women’s political position in this same world. All women, white and of color, were now socially free, but politically almost powerless except by their own bottom-up revolution through their labor/ entrepreneurial efforts.
In the World of Civil War Made, Zimmerman discusses the idea of women of color being part of the machinery of capitalism. He cites Marx, using his fairly dispassionate and purely analytical argument with regard the roles of humans in general living under a capitalist system. Marx, despite not writing directly about the Civil War, was known to have written against the practice of slavery and for its abolishment and he saw society in general as beginning at the division of labor of the sexes.
Zaggari points to the progress made by white women and women of color, wherein they begin to become their own means of production, as Marx predicted, in a bottom-up movement in society. Marx comes closest to recognizing women being used as tools in the division of labor, but that would also apply to men. He doesn’t make a distinction about how white women were used as opposed to how women of color were used. Both were used for the purposes of empirical men. Marx saw women’s place in society as defining it, or as a measurement of the society as a whole. This indicates only that Marx recognized women as tools in a society; however, since his theory tends to see all the people as tools of their society to some extent, it is difficult to tell if Marx was particularly concerned about the place the women held specifically. He, like the men of his age, lived in an era that may have made it difficult to see that women were treated not merely as tools, but as lesser ones, and tools with virtually no political power, like slaves. As proof of this possibility, he never doubted that slavery was primarily the cause of the Civil War. Therefore, it may be fair to say that he didn’t see women’s roles as tools to serve others as a problem, or as a slave-like condition that needed addressing that arose to the level of justifying war.
Marx did say, however, “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (p.320). The idea was that the struggle of the wage laborer was part of the fight against slavery, and once again women were not seen as that part of this wage labor movement. Therefore, they were unintentionally invisible in the revolution against unequal power in the world.
Zaggari and Zimmerman had the benefit of hindsight over Marx. Zaggari, however, despite recognizing that white women and women of color were making themselves part of the labor class, does not address that fact that they were following Marx’s bottom up revolutionary theory. According to Zimmerman, white women were tools that helped society function in the Marxist sense, but with power limited to the social sphere, on par with women of color. What Zaggari and Zimmerman both miss, it that women entrepreneurs were creating a place for themselves in politics, as the labor and social worlds did influence the political world, and this was also true of women of color. Entrepreneurship was doing more to change their world than the fight for equal rights for all people, as white women were still not equal to any men, even after the Civil war, and women of color were freed from slavery but found themselves, like white women, not relevant politically. Entrepreneurship was the key to women being relevant and rising in political power versus remaining tools for other’s uses.