How Did Harriet Jacobs And Northup Overcome Slavery?
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Throughout the semester we have read autobiographies of the many few African Americans who had to bare the injustice and cruelty of American slavery. One of those was the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, who was born into slavery and wrote about the cult of true womanhood and the sexual exploitation of black slave women. Meanwhile in the film 12 Years of Slave, Solomon Northup is a free black man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery as we see his journey all throughout until he is free. Both Harriet Jacobs and Solomon Northup experienced mistreatment and dehumanization under the same institution of slavery. Neither had it worst than the other because they experienced the harsh conditions of slavery however, because of a gender difference each faced different challenges as they overcame slavery. In Incidents in the Life Of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs details her experience as Black woman living in slavery and how she escaped slavery. As Jacobs states, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women” (Jacobs 77). Black slave women were often raped, beaten, and tortured in many occasions. Which is why Jacobs felt…show more content… However, because of gender their lives and experiences differed. In Jacbob’s situation, “He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him—where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature” (Jacobs 27). Women slaves were subjected to the same harsh labor, gruesome beatings and insults as men but what made women especially different from men was the traumas they had to withstand from being raped and the aftermath of bearing their children. These women had no control over their freedom or their