Knowra Harriet Jacobs Harriet Jacobs Harriet Jacobs was an African American abolitionist and author whose 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , recounts her escape from slavery.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 autobiography, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, recounts her life in slavery and escape. The autobiography through which Jacobs made her experience and antislavery argument public.
Domestic slave trade : The forced sale and transport of enslaved people within the United States. Jacobs describes the threat of sale that separated families and constrained enslaved women.
Lydia Maria Child : An American abolitionist, author, and editor who edited Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography. Child prepared Jacobs’s manuscript for publication and wrote its preface.
Black women’s history : The study of Black women’s lives, labor, thought, and activism across history. Jacobs’s testimony preserves a first-person account of Black women’s experiences under slavery.
Edenton, North Carolina : A coastal North Carolina town where Harriet Jacobs was born and enslaved. Jacobs’s early life and enslavement began in this town.
Sexual exploitation in slavery : Sexual coercion and abuse imposed on enslaved people by enslavers and others with power over them. Jacobs makes the sexual abuse of enslaved women central to her testimony.
Frederick Douglass : An African American abolitionist and author whose autobiography became a landmark antislavery narrative. Douglass’s public career offers a comparison with Jacobs’s distinct account of slavery.
Intersectionality : A framework for analyzing how overlapping systems of power shape people’s experiences. Jacobs shows how race, gender, and enslavement combined to shape her vulnerability and choices.
Slavery in the United States : A system that treated people of African descent as property and compelled their labor in the United States. Jacobs’s account exposes how this institution controlled enslaved people’s lives.
Fugitive slave : A person who escaped slavery, especially in the context of laws and practices seeking their capture and return. Jacobs’s years in hiding and eventual escape place her within this experience.
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