Sexual Dangers For Enslaved Women

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Sexual Dangers for Enslaved Women
Harriet Jacobs recounts her experience as a slave in a plantation where she saw the suffering that other slaves went through. In this particular excerpt, she writes about a man who was nearly beaten to death for quarreling with his wife about the real father of her children. She goes on to give a story of a girl who dies during childbirth immediately after her newborn baby dies. The intended audiences of this document were the women of the North. The author urged them that unless they spoke out, they were as guilty as those southerners who mistreated the women.
Women were forced to sleep with the masters of their husbands but were not allowed to even say a word about it. Months after the man is beaten up to near death, he is handed over together with his wife to a slave trader. Dr. Flint decides to do this business because the man’s wife ‘had let her tongue run too far’(Brent 23). This incident alone brings out the idea that women were used as sexual tools by their masters. Whatever consequences that came afterward were to be suffered by them and their families alone.
There is also another incident of a girl dying during childbirth. This happened moments after her child whom he conceived after sleeping with a white man had died. It might not have been her choice to do so, but according to her mistress, she deserved all the suffering she was going through (Brent 23). The suffering of any black woman was not taken seriously by the white mistresses.

It was, in fact, regarded as a punishment for their ‘actions’. The circumstances under which this document was written shows that the slaves had little if any, control over what the masters and any person of a higher ranking wanted to do with their bodies.
The women were not just used to satisfy their masters’ lust but also as ‘breeders.’ They were forced to bear children as an act of multiplying the master’s ‘wealth.’ The master had his blood children born to the enslaved women and was later sold to preserve the honor of his wife. Most of the content narrated by the author in this excerpt is in line with what other historians have been writing about slavery and the role of women in such situations.
This excerpt brings out the character of the author as a concerned woman. She cared about what happened to her fellow slaves. The terrible punishment given to the poor man whose wife had been used by the slaveholder as a breeder and the death of the girl who died moments after her child’s death are among the many incidents which might have pushed her to be an activist. Her message to the other women is testimony enough that she was one of those people who believe in bringing change and not waiting for it to come.
In conclusion, many critics might think of such narratives as deceptive and with very little facts about them. Although the truth about such incidents may not be proven, the intended message by the author cannot be ignored. According to many historians, men were important to the slaveholders because of their labor and women were equally important because of their children. The women are always brought out as helpless, but the author is the opposite of that as she encourages women to stand up for their lives.

Work Cited
Brent, Linda. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Simon and Schuster, 2013.