The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Slavery was common in the eighteenth century. Slaves were seen as property, as they were taken from their native land and forced into long hours of labor. The experience was traumatic for both black men and black women. They were physically and mentally abused by slave owners, dehumanized by the system, and ultimately denied their fundamental rights to a favorable American life. Although African men and women were both subjected to the same enslavement, men and women had different experiences in slavery based on their gender. A male perspective can be seen in, My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass. A female perspective is shared in Harriet Jacobs’ narrative titled, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Upon reading both of the viewpoints provided, along with outside research, one can infer that women had it worse.

The feminist movement sought to gain rights for women. Many feminist during the early nineteenth century fought for the abolition of slavery around the world. The slave narrative became a powerful feminist tool in the nineteenth century. Black and white women are fictionalized and objectified in the slave narrative. White women are idealized as pure, angelic, and chaste while black woman are idealized as exotic and contained an uncontrollable, savage sexuality. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, brought the sexual oppression of captive black women into the public and political arena.

Harriet Jacobs was born a slave herself in Edenton, North Carolina and was one of the first women to write a slave narrative in the United States of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). It was to address the white women of the North and thousands of “Slave mothers that are still in bondage in the South” (Jacobs 126). Jacobs tells her life of twenty-seven years in slavery in-depth life as a slave, and the choices she made to gain freedom for herself and her children. She writes a story about her families ' and masks them as well as her name as “Linda Brent” in her novel to protect herself in a sense as well as some of the important places in town. Harriet shows in her story the fights and sexual abuse that she faced as a slave on

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are both prominent influential authors of the Reform Era. Both writers, who spring forth from similar backgrounds and unimaginable situations, place a spotlight on the peculiar circumstances that surrounded the lives of the African American slaves. After reading and analyzing both Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; readers discover the horrifying truths that belong to the past in connection to slavery.

One writer that has discussed some of the problems, challenges, and injustices black females have faced in America is Harriet Jacobs. In her writing From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she narrates as Linda Brown, the problems that black females experienced during slavery. She talks about how she was sexually harassed and abused by her slave master and how she struggled to escape from him in order to achieve freedom; for her and for her child. Jacobs addressed this memoir to white women from the North, in order to shed light into the problems of sexual abuse that many female slaves faced on plantations. This experiences made her realize that even though slavery was “terrible for men”, it was “far more terrible for women”, due to the fact that many female slaves were constantly harassed and abused by their masters and could not do anything about it. Jacobs states, “I was compelled to live under the same roof with him-- where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must subject to his will in all things” (231). This demonstrates that black female slaves were put in a situation that, because of slavery, could not escape. Jacobs, like many female slaves, was trapped in a house where she was constantly seeing her abuser and was compelled to stay there. Not only that, but, she had no protection as a female since society is ruled by white men, as well as the fact that she was constantly

Harriet Jacobs book tells us a lot about gender and race, and the issues faced in the U.S. South during the 19th century. In the lifetime of slaves within the south, daily routines very much banked on the slaves gender. Male slaves were known to work out doors doing more physical labor compared to women who were known to be caretakers and do small petty things. Family life for slaves in the south was not easy due to the fact that they were constantly taken away from each other. Marriages in the South were also difficult for slaves and for slaveholders. In Harriet Jacobs’ book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jacobs gives clear descriptions of the conceptions of masculinity and femininity between slaves, their family life, and of love/marriage

With these words, Harriet Jacobs begins her autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs harrowing account details her experiences as a slave in North Carolina, her escape to freedom in the north, and her ensuing struggles to free her children. It is one of the celebrated examples of the genre known as the slave narrative; a written or orally related account of the life of a slave, in the words of said slave. From 1760 to the end of the Civil War, approximately 100 autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves appeared. After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, at least 50 more former slaves wrote or dictated accounts of their lives (Gates, Introduction). The authors of these narratives typically began by writing about what it was like to be a child in bondage, giving us the first recorded accounts of African American child life. This is not surprising, considering the distinctive youthfulness of the “home-grown” slave population in the South. While other slave societies in the Americas relied upon continuing imports of slaves, most slaves in the antebellum United States were native-born (The Domestic Slave Trade). As a result, over 50% of the slave population in the South was younger than sixteen (Mintz). In this paper, I will explore how these children were represented in slave narratives and what these tales tell us about what life was like for a child born into slavery in the United States during

When someone mentions slavery in American history, one may imagine hard working African Americans planting cotton or plowing fields in the scorching heat. Others may recall learning about the Underground Railroad or how slaves would escape their cruel masters and flee to the North. While both ideas were true, not many people think of the harsh lives of African American women who were often treated worse than their male counterparts, both physically and mentally. Harriet Ann Jacobs, an American author and former slave, challenges the normal stereotypes we often encounter when discussing American slavery in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Furthermore, she gives a critical voice for slave women and writes to encourage the abolishment of slavery with true accounts from her life.

In the memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs pens under a pseudonym with which she exposes her experiences of being a slave, her escape journey, and the incessant threats of post-slavery. Harriet Jacobs, an intelligent woman, writes her account in response to those, such as George Fitzhugh, who defends slavery. In, Harriet Jacobs’ memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she challenges those who defend slavery by recalling how her slave master harasses her, does not provide her with necessities, and even hurts her children.

‘Murica!!! The land of the free! The home of the brave! Call it what you want! Dream about it, celebrate it and worship it! Just know, you’re worshipping one of the most hypocritical countries there is! How do I know!? One word: Slavery! Freedom is never equal. That’s always been the reality. Let’s go back to the 1800s. Slavery was the basis of Southern society and robbed millions of African Americans of their freedom. So what did they do? They got it back. But, not every runaway slave dreamed of the same freedom. Between those who made it North and out of the Cotton Belt, there were various different perceptions of freedom. Two examples of this are Harriet Jacobs, a female slave from North Carolina who eventually runs away to the North and Frederick Douglass, a Maryland slave who escapes and becomes a leading abolitionist. To document their lives, both would go on to write autobiographies, with Douglass penning Narrative on the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and Jacobs writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the name Linda Brent. Each books tell the story of how the author became free and the journey they took to get there. Even though they both encounter the harshness of slavery and experience similar successes once they escape it, the circumstances regarding their situations are completely different. These circumstances play a huge role in deciding their fates. Stemming from that fact, the types of freedom each is looking for becomes different

What I personally hope to accomplish with this film is to educate my classmates about the book written by Harriet Jacobs called the life of a slave girl, all while accomplishing to showcase my group's qualities of working together and turning up with a good outcome. The book is a narrative biography about the author's life as she goes through Slavery; In the book, she refers to herself as Linda. As the different groups present their films to each other, we are all going to have different perspectives on each film. Some may think some are well done, which will result in the presenters actually getting a good response from the audience. However, I think many of the audience members will be too disinterested to give the film a chance in the first place. My group's goal is to make an

insulted. Harriet Jacobs was not allowed to marry the person she wanted to marry instead she was focus to be with her master and treated very cruelty until she got pregnant from another white man.

In the novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacob’s writes an autobiography about the personal struggles her family, as well as women in bondage, commonly face while maturing in the Southern part of America. While young and enslaved, Harriet had learned how to read, write, sew, and taught how to perform other tasks associated with a ladies work from her first mistress. With the advantage of having a background in literacy, Harriet Jacobs later came to the realization that she would one day be able to tell her story about the tormented lives women endured while being white folk’s property. A repeating theme in the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is of her own reflections on how slavery is dehumanizing. Jacobs, referring to her slave-owner at the time, states “when he told me that I was made for his use; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will, must and should surrender to his, never before had my puny arm felt half so strong” (Jacobs pg. 29). Jacob’s continuously expresses her deep-rooted hatred of slavery, much like an immoral institution, so much that she frequently imagined that death would be a better alternative than living a life as a slave. It is almost as if slavery was a cancer, affecting black individuals and their families as they continuously suffered tragedies, yet there seemed to be no provided cure for any given freedom. It is impossible to exaggerate the depths of how extreme slavery actually was. It is much like an institution that

The way that Harriet Jacobs describes slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was not a surprise to me. I believed that slaves were treated poorly and often times were hurt, the way that I thought of slavery is just like it is described in the book if not worse. I will discuss what I believed slavery was like before I read the book, how slavery was according to the book using in text citations and examples and also explain my thoughts on why the treatment was not a surprise to me.

This story is about an African American female slave, Harriet Jacobs, writing about her trials and tribulations that her life in bondage has brought to her. The letter commences with her describing her type of work which is taking care of the master’s children. The story makes a 180 when she addresses the fact that she turned fifteen and the master starts to sexually pursue her. She describes the different ways he tries to seduce her. Furthermore, she tries to avoid him as long as she physically can, trying to not allow her nightmare to come true. From my point of view, the author is trying to convey how helpless her situation was and how wrong it felt to just give herself up just because of her slave status.