Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Although Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Jacobs lived almost 300 years apart from one
another, the basic undercurrent of both of their work is the same. Wollstonecraft was a feminist
before her time and Jacobs was a freed slave who wanted more than just her own freedom.
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Jacobs’ Incidents In the Life of a
Slave Girl, Written By Herself were both revolutionary texts that were meant to inspire change
and the liberation of a group of people. For Wollstonecraft, this was women; for Jacobs, it was
the slaves. On the surface, these two works do not seem to be much related, but it is in this theme
of liberation that they are deeply connected. Even though these very different women were
writing in two very different worlds, they both still manage to get across the idea that it is in the
tyranny of slavery, mentally or physically, that one’s true self is lost. The oppression of a person's
free will through the tyranny of slavery or absence of women's rights are virtually the same thing:
they both suppress a person's natural identity and the only way to liberation is through the
education and humanization of those being oppressed.
The first key idea in both Wollstonecraft’s and Jacobs’ texts is that women and slaves are
only defined by those who own them, they cannot define themselves. Both women write of the
dehumanization that slaves and women experience. Wollstonecraft says that women in her time
are simply objects of desire, instructed to play the feminine role, “...enfeebled by false
refineme...
... middle of paper ...
...ps a person of all dignity and humanity, all
free-will gone. In both cases it is impossible to deny the implications for a loss of identity. If a
person is stripped of choice, denied an education, and trained to live within the false restrictions
of society, is impossible for them to have an identity.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Harriet. “Incidents In the Life of A Slave Girl, Written By Herself.” The Pearson Custom
Library of American Literature. Ed. John Bryant et al. Compiled for English 370B,
Spring 2005. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2003. Pages 418-77.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication on the Rights of Woman.” The Longman Anthology of
British Literature: Volume 2A- The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Ed. Susan
Wolfson and Peter Manning. New York: Longman, 2003. Pages 230-257.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Structures on Political and Moral
Born as a free woman in London, England Mary argued for education along with unjust laws for women that subjected them to a form of slavery. As the world around her at the time was facing a political breakthrough with the United States using idea’s formed by philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes theories in the social contract, to break free from England, she hoped the French Revolution would create an era of equality and reason. Wollstonecraft places her opinion that the condition of adult women is caused by the neglect of education for girls. Most of the essay is based on her argument for education of
Jacobs, Harriet A.. Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
...f Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she, as well as many other slave women, had to endure. Her narrative focuses on the domestic issues that faced African-American women, she even states, “Slavery is bad for men, but it is far more terrible for women”. Therefore, gender separated the two narratives, and gave each a distinct view toward slavery.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl. 2nd Edition. Edited by Pine T. Joslyn. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, INC., 2001.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jennifer Fleischner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. Print.
Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglass are both very incredible and powerful writers who narrated their enslavement encounters in a passionate and compelling manner. Jacob’s narrative describes the abuses she had to go through personally especially because of her gender. She describes how the women slaves were exploited not only for their productive capabilities but reproductive ones as well. This is why she remarked, “Slavery is terrible for men but is far more terrible for women”. This is a clear indication that in addition to being enslaved, Jacob’s had to overcome the hurdle of being a female as well.
Mary Wollstonecraft was as revolutionary in her writings as Thomas Paine. They were both very effective writers and conveyed the messages of their ideas quite well even though both only had only the most basic education. Wollstonecraft was a woman writing about women's rights at a time when these rights were simply non-existent and this made her different from Paine because she was breaking new ground, thus making her unique. Throughout her lifetime, Wollstonecraft wrote about the misconception that women did not need an education, but were only meant to be submissive to man. Women were treated like a decoration that had no real function except to amuse and beguile. Wollstonecraft was the true leader in women's rights, advocating a partnership in relationships and marriage rather than a dictatorship. She was firm in her conviction that education would give women the ability to take a more active role in life itself.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Penguin Group, 2000. Print.
Slavery in the middle of the 19th century was well known by every American in the country, but despite the acknowledgment of slavery the average citizen did not realize the severity of the lifestyle of the slave before slave narratives began to arise. In Incidents in the life of a slave girl, Harriet Jacobs uses an explicit tone to argue the general life of slave compared to a free person, as well as the hardships one endured on one’s path to freedom. Jacobs fought hard in order to expand the abolitionist movement with her narrative. She was able to draw in the readers by elements of slave culture that helped the slaves endure the hardships like religion and leisure and the middle class ideals of the women being “submissive, past, domestic,
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
...e that chattel slavery was a cruel, perverse institution that no human should ever have to endure. Most people realize today how hypocritical it was to call oneself a Christian, while treating slaves so horribly. Throughout her book, Harriet Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, revealed Americans everywhere that slave owners were hypocrites, and calling themselves Christians was perhaps the greatest sin of all.
Douglass's narrative is, on one surface, intended to show the barbarity and injustice of slavery. However, the underlying argument is that freedom is not simply attained through a physical escape from forced labor, but through a mental liberation from the attitude created by Southern slavery. The slaves of the South were psychologically oppressed by the slaveholders' disrespect for a slave’s family and for their education, as well as by the slaves' acceptance of their own subordination. Additionally, the slaveholders were trapped by a mentality that allowed them to justify behavior towards human beings that would normally not be acceptable. In this manner, both slaveholder and slave are corrupted by slavery.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a self-educated, radical philosopher who wrote about liberation, and empowering women. She had a powerful voice on her views of the rights of women to get good education and career opportunities. She pioneered the debate for women’s rights inspiring many of the 19th and the 20th century’s writers and philosophers to fight for women’s rights, as well. She did not only criticize men for not giving women their rights, she also put a blame on women for being voiceless and subservient. Her life and, the surrounding events of her time, accompanied by the strong will of her, had surely affected the way she chose to live her life, and to form her own philosophies.