2.22 Gender and Resistance in Slave Narratives

Laws against rape did not protect enslaved women. Enslavers and overseers abused them without legal consequences, and under partus sequitur ventrem (2.8) any children were born enslaved.

Enslaved women resisted in the ways open to them. Some fought their attackers. Some used plants to end pregnancies. In the most desperate cases, some took their children's lives rather than see them enslaved. Some ran away with their children when they could.

Slave narratives described suffering under slavery, ways of escaping and ways of learning to read and write. They stressed the humanity of enslaved people to win readers to abolition.

Narratives by men and women often differed. Men's narratives, like Douglass's, tended to stress independence and manhood: fighting back, escaping alone, claiming a voice. Women's narratives reflected the gender expectations of their time. They focused on home and family, modesty, and their constant vulnerability to sexual violence and exploitation. Women writers had to tell painful truths while keeping the sympathy of readers who expected women to be modest.

Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda and was enslaved in Bermuda, the salt ponds of the Turks Islands and Antigua. Her enslavers brought her to London, where she left them. Her narrative, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), was the first account by a Black woman published in Britain. It described brutal beatings and the separation of families, and it fed British support for ending slavery in the Caribbean, which Parliament voted to do in 1833.

Harriet Jacobs was enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (copyrighted in 1860 and published in 1861 under the pen name Linda Brent), she described years of sexual harassment by her enslaver, called 'Dr. Flint' in the book. To protect herself and her children, she hid for nearly seven years in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother's house before escaping north.

Jacobs wrote directly to Northern white women, asking them to see enslaved women's suffering as a wrong against all women. It's often called the first book-length slave narrative written by an African American woman herself (Sojourner Truth's 1850 narrative was dictated to a white writer), and it connected abolition to women's concerns.