Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs (1813 or 1815-1897) was an African-American writer. Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her master. When he threatened to sell her children, she hid in a tiny crawlspace under the roof of her grandmother's house, who had been set free by her enslaver some years earlier. After staying there for seven years, she finally managed to escape to New York, where she was reunited with her children Joseph and Louisa Matilda and her brother John S. Jacobs. She found work as a nanny for the children of author Nathaniel Parker Willis and got into contact with abolitionist and feminist reformers. During and immediately after the Civil War, she went to the Union-occupied parts of the South together with her daughter, organizing help and founding two schools for fugitive and freed slaves. Her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pen name Linda Brent, is considered an American classic. According to historian J. F. Yellin, it has a "radical feminist content". A central pattern in her story shows white women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women.