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Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

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I believe that Jacobs’s treatment of gender in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is utilized to emphasize the challenges and hardships that were unique to enslaved women. Jacobs’s focus on enslaved women helped to garner sympathy from her audience that was made up of primarily white, Northern women. The audience is also educated through her autobiography and many misconceptions about slavery held at the time are dispelled in her narrative. An example of an idea about slavery that Jacobs’s narrative corrects is the idea that enslaved women are “sapphires” or “jezebels” who seduce men. White male slave owners used this idea of black women as a way to justify their rape and sexual assault. Jacobs’s circumstances are not of her own making

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