Summary Of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

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Harriet Jacobs, who lived from 1813-1879, was a very appreciative, kind loving women, with a strong desire for freedom, because she was considered nothing more than a slave to everyone. She taught herself how to read and write while in bondage, and when she escaped her bondage, she used the power of the pen and composed her life into a book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She wrote the book in the pen name Linda Brent. This slave narrative was written to expose all the free women of the North to the horrors of slavery. By doing this she hoped to increase the abolitionist movement in the hopes of ending slavery. Harriet Jacobs put up an argument against slavery that no other Abolitionist or male slave could. Her argument is …show more content…
She says, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own”(77). Majority of slave narratives were written by men, and they described their physical pain and the whippings that they got. Then they endured more pain escaping to the North. Jacob's story is different because she is a female slave, and this quote is saying that whether they were beaten to death, starved, been deprived of their humanity, that the sexual harrasments by the White masters’ is just as difficult sometimes even worse than the physical torture.
Harriet Jacobs then addresses the North as a whole saying that they don’t the truth about what the masters are doing to slave women. "[I] earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is”(6). This quote shows how Harriet Jacobs wants to show the Northerners what was going on in the South so they can bring this to a
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