Analysis Of Harrie Harriet Jacobs 'Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl'

While rich white women and laborious white women were subjected to abuse or emotional neglect due to the expectations of the “Southern Belle” title, they did not suffer the abundance of sexual abuse that black women did. In Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South, Michelle Gillespie and Susanna Delfino point out that, “…southern women’s historians have performed an especially noteworthy service by exposing white men’s construction of a sexual double standard that allowed them to depict slave women as highly sensual and therefore objects of their lust while simultaneously praising “southern ladies” for their gentility, piety, and virtue” (3). This complexity of valuing purity in white women while sexualizing black women is not only racist, but could be blamed on white men fulfilling their sexual desires while respecting the code of the “Southern Belle”. …show more content…
At a young age, she begins to deal with her white master’s constant advances. Jacobs wrote in her memoir, “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother's grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there” (46). Unfortunately, Jacobs was just one of many slaves in the Old South caught in the predicament of a man holding her life in his hands and preying upon her. The sexual abuse of black women by white men would not stop with the end of the Civil