A point to which Davis returned throughout her speech was the need for feminists to be conscious of class and race as well as of gender. Davis also stressed the interdependence of the various issues that constitute the struggle for women's rights.

"In 1971, I was in jail," said Davis, drawing scattered laughter from the crowd. "While I was in jail, I tried to participate as much as possible in movements that were unfolding in the so-called free world ... There was a huge reproductive rights rally scheduled in San Francisco. I was in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge.

"I was asked to write a statement that very specifically engaged with the issue of abortion rights. Of course, I was in favor of women's abortion rights, but I did not want to take women's abortion rights out of the context of the broader conglomeration of issues that constitute women's reproductive rights.

"At that time, we had learned that vast numbers of Native American women had been sterilized. We'd also learned about the extent to which Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs by pharmaceutical companies in the production of what was then the new birth control pill. So, I wrote a statement in which I tried to make connections between women's reproductive rights and women's right to be free from forced sterilization. The statement wasn't read.

"My position was, I cannot talk about abortion rights in isolation from these other issues. I've come to understand that when we talk about feminist epistemologies, we speak precisely about the ability to think, together, about things that often do not cohabit the same analytical space."