Feminism and Slavery Essay -- Literature Feminist Papers

Feminism and Slavery Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and at neat personal risk wrote of her trials as a house servant in the South and later fugitive in the North. Her slave narrative authorise Incidents in the Life of a Slave young woman gave a unbowed account of the evils slavery held for women, a perspective that has been kept relatively conundrum from the public. In writing her story, Jacobs, though focused on the subjugation payable to race, gave voice subtly to a different kind of captivity, that which men see on women regardless of color in the patriarchal society of the ninetenth century. This body of bondage is not only exacted from women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but also is authoritative and perpetuated by women themselves, who forge the cage that holds them captive. Jacobs directed her stirring account of the afflictions a woman is subjected to in the chain of slavery to women of the North to gain kindness for their sisters that were en slaved in the South. In showing this, Jacobs reveals the danger of such self censure women maintain by accepting the idealized role that men guard set as a goal for which to strive. Harriet Jacobs slave epic is a powerful statement unveiling the impossibility and undesirability of achieving the ideal put off by men and maintained by women. Her narrative is a steadfast feminist text.The idealized Woman that men and women alike propagated consists of quatern qualities. The attributes of accepted Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues- piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.1 Of all of the women that Jacobs autobiographical character Linda Brent meets, not nonpareil ... ... Perilous Passages in Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in The Discourse of Slavery Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Plasa, Carl and Ring, Betty J., eds. New York Routledge, 1994.McK ay, Nellie Y. The Girls Who Became Women Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, bloody shame Church Terrell, and Anne Moody in Tradition and the Talents of Women. Howe, Florence, ed. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1991.Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in African-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1987.Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative Its Place in American History. Washington, D.C. Howard University Press, 1988.Welter, Barbara. The Cult of authorized Womanhood 1820-1860 chap. in Dimity Convictions The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. capital of Greece Ohio University Press, 1976.