Political theorists most often think of racial and gender subordination in relation to activities within the formal public sphere and the productive economy; they have been insufficiently attentive to subordination in the sphere of intimate relations. Marginalization from the activities associated with femininity is an important aspect of black women's oppression. This marginalization is unjust because it prevents black women from having equal access to the activities required to care for and nurture the products of the reproductive labor of their own bodies and to sustain life for themselves and their families. Black women's struggle for equal access to female-gendered social roles is an important part of the struggle for racial equality and gender justice that must factor into contemporary normative theories of social arrangements.

Political theorists' disregard for citizen's access to female-gendered activities stems from the lack of esteem given to these activities in Western political thought, ancient and modern. I examine Hannah Arendt's account of the three domains of human activity – "labor," "work," and "action," – and her critique of Marx's "dignification of labor." This "dignification" represented a significant reversal in the status of political participation as the activity necessary for human freedom in the ancient world as productive labor took its place in the modern one. Her critique reveals that, despite the reversal, the tradition has always held activities associated with femininity in low esteem. I argue that enslaved women's account of human freedom, an account that profoundly influenced black feminist thought, presents a significant challenge to this tradition.

I examine the historical forms of black women's alienation from activities associated with femininity, including a labor system that forced women to produce children as property and forced the women out of reproductive labor for their families and into productive labor in slavery, white resistance to freed women's efforts to perform female-gendered social roles for their families in the post-Emancipation period, as well as sterilization abuse and racially biased child-removal policies in the 20^th-century. Justice requires that all have equal access to the activities that have as their object reproduction, care and nurturance for their families.