The Trials of Harriet Jacobs and Their Relevance to the Lives of Today 's Women
Harriet Jacobs was an escaped slave from Edenton, North Carolina. During her life as a slave she faced forced labor, sexual harassment from her owner, abuse from his jealous wife, the threat of her two children being abused and taken away from her side, spending perhaps seven years in an attic crawl space to remain free before escaping to the North, and being hunted as an escaped slave. She later authored a book regarding her experiences, as a slave, under the pen name Linda Brent. In her book she addresses the abuses, obstacles, and persecution she endured for simply being born a black woman into slavery.
One would think that since the adoption of the 13th amendment …show more content…
That assertion is proven to be weak by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), which reports that “one in five women” will be raped at some point in their lives and “one in four girls” will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen years old. Jacobs ' ordeal with Dr. Flint 's sexual suggestions and plans for pedophilia, are not a problem trapped in a distant past and lost to the fog of history. She makes an observation that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women … they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Jacobs 830). Here she refers to the sexual exploitation and abuse that predominately afflicted women and girls under their male masters and suggests that the darkness of slavery, she suffered, affects women more than men. This darkness continues to be relevant, for women, today as seen in the NSVRC report that as much as “91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault are …show more content…
The reasons for the removal varied and changed from a drug conviction that the city already knew about before the adoption, to mental health issues because she used Ambien, a medication commonly prescribed for insomnia, to fall asleep. Every Mother is a Working Mother (EMWM) saw her case as an example of a problem seen all over the world: “Poverty and a lack of opportunity become an excuse to separate children from their families” (Jaffe). Their specific grievance was the agencies complaining that she did not possess a GED. The current system 's response to a family 's economic hardship is to remove the child instead of providing services and financial resources. Keeping that in mind when considering “one-third of children in foster care are black, despite black children making up only 15 percent of the nation 's children” (Jaffe) and a pattern emerges. More economically challenged black mothers, as well as mothers in different minorities, are disproportionately getting their children taken away by agencies working for the state. Being poor does not impact your right to have children, unless the state has an interest in those children through an adoption agency. An EMWM employee working with Carolyn Hill said it best: “[The agencies] are not
Harriet Jacobs was an escaped slave from Edenton, North Carolina. During her life as a slave she faced forced labor, sexual harassment from her owner, abuse from his jealous wife, the threat of her two children being abused and taken away from her side, spending perhaps seven years in an attic crawl space to remain free before escaping to the North, and being hunted as an escaped slave. She later authored a book regarding her experiences, as a slave, under the pen name Linda Brent. In her book she addresses the abuses, obstacles, and persecution she endured for simply being born a black woman into slavery.
One would think that since the adoption of the 13th amendment …show more content…
That assertion is proven to be weak by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), which reports that “one in five women” will be raped at some point in their lives and “one in four girls” will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen years old. Jacobs ' ordeal with Dr. Flint 's sexual suggestions and plans for pedophilia, are not a problem trapped in a distant past and lost to the fog of history. She makes an observation that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women … they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Jacobs 830). Here she refers to the sexual exploitation and abuse that predominately afflicted women and girls under their male masters and suggests that the darkness of slavery, she suffered, affects women more than men. This darkness continues to be relevant, for women, today as seen in the NSVRC report that as much as “91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault are …show more content…
The reasons for the removal varied and changed from a drug conviction that the city already knew about before the adoption, to mental health issues because she used Ambien, a medication commonly prescribed for insomnia, to fall asleep. Every Mother is a Working Mother (EMWM) saw her case as an example of a problem seen all over the world: “Poverty and a lack of opportunity become an excuse to separate children from their families” (Jaffe). Their specific grievance was the agencies complaining that she did not possess a GED. The current system 's response to a family 's economic hardship is to remove the child instead of providing services and financial resources. Keeping that in mind when considering “one-third of children in foster care are black, despite black children making up only 15 percent of the nation 's children” (Jaffe) and a pattern emerges. More economically challenged black mothers, as well as mothers in different minorities, are disproportionately getting their children taken away by agencies working for the state. Being poor does not impact your right to have children, unless the state has an interest in those children through an adoption agency. An EMWM employee working with Carolyn Hill said it best: “[The agencies] are not