University of Bielefeld

Anglistik: British and American Studies (BA)

"It′s Moe, the White Slave," Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives (230594)

Profile Module 6: American Literature

Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The Question of True Womanhood

Gender and Race Conventions

Daniela Schulze

Anglistik (KF) / Germanistik (NF), Semester 5

Due to: 02.03.2009

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (1861) by Harriet Jacobs is a multilayered slave

narrative, it concerns many major subjects like the violent, regardless behaviour of white

middle class women towards slaves in the U.S. South during the antebellum years as well as

the peculiar institution and social cohesion within the family. But in this essay I will

concentrate on gender and race conventions and the protagonist′s struggle of gaining true

womanhood. First I will examine what true womanhood is and how it developed. Ongoing I

will also analyse these conventions in relation to Linda Brent, the protagonist of Harriet

Jacobs′ autobiographical narrative, and other characters having an influence on Linda. As a

last point I will examine the author′s intention to stress the ideal woman.

The cult of true womanhood was a cultural convention only for white upper-class women

of the mid-nineteenth century America. It was their ultimate ambition to maintain their

womanhood and live according to its attributes. Poorer white women also tried to reach these

standards but often failed. Black woman, especially slaves in the South, usually had no

chance to acquire it at all. But these virtues mentally applied for every woman although not

every woman could achieve the standard publicly in society. It was like a very strict guideline

for young girls to become a respectable woman in the social order. (Garfield 48 ­ 51).

There was a closed set of attributes describing true womanhood: piety, purity, domesticity

and submissiveness. Piety described the women′s relation to religion. The women should

have been born as Christians but not belong to any Afro-American religion. They should

have believed in God and work with him to improve the world. He was the source of strength

and dignity for women. Their behavior should have been innocent and gentle. An advantage

of the church was that it also supported the other attributes of true womanhood better than

many other movements (Welter 152). Purity was the factor that was most important but also

most difficult to achieve for blacks, it meant that the woman had to be sexually pure and

chaste; otherwise she had to face terrible consequences. Women who lost their purity (except

for the wedding night, when she bestowed her body on her husband) usually turned mad or

they allegedly even died (Welter 154 ­ 155). Black slaves were on the horns of a dilemma

because they were often raped by their masters and are therefore not pure any longer but on

the contrary they had no chance to defy themselves. Like Washington writes in her article,

Jacobs herself said that the women were not permitted to have control over their womanhood

although they might have a strong moral sense because they were only property ("Modern

Voices"). Domesticity instead was a virtue to be proud of for every woman. Wifely duties

were to set up one′s own house and to take care for the children. It was self-evident that men

had to work hard outside the household. Many black female slaves worked in the household

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but were still not domestic according to the virtues of true womanhood because it was not

their own but the master′s household. The last attribute, submissiveness, stated that women

should have been passive and obedient and men served as the protectors of the family

(Johnson 18 ­ 28). The only place where women were allowed to move was in the house,

they were the master′s hostels. A true woman was also never allowed to be part of a dispute.

All fugitive slaves and their anti-racist helpers were absolutely disobedient and not

submissive at all, because one of the biggest malpractices concerning submissiveness was to

hide a slave in his house or help him in any other way (Logan "Feminism and Slavery").

The concept of true womanhood was culturally determined by powerful white men and

had the special function which allowed masters to condemn their female slaves. The masters

could always put pressure on their slaves because of their wrong behavior concerning the

current gender conventions. On the one hand black women could never reach true

womanhood as it was restricted to white women; on the other hand they had to be ashamed of

being impure (after being harassed or raped by their masters, which is paradox: the master

expects his female slaves to be pure but he rapes them and thus makes them impure) and not

devoted enough to their masters (Garfield 182). Moreover the slaveholders and overseers

were aware of the fact that they were unjust to their slaves and therefore afraid of the slaves

killing them, so they decided to "give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them

from murdering their masters" (Jacobs 105). The slaveholders were in the opinion that the

more the black people believed in God and the Ten Commandments, the less was the

probability of committing a crime or even a murder. It was important for a white woman to

be pious, because religion also made them submissive. Now we have come to a full circle, if

the women fulfilled the attributes of true womanhood, they felt socially accepted but they

were also totally dependent on men. Those men requisitioned their "rights" forcefully with

dishonourable inhuman punishments (Jacobs 46). Nevertheless almost all mid-nineteenth

century American women wanted to live according to the standards of true womanhood.

For a slave girl like Linda Brent, the cardinal virtues of true womanhood were not

possible to fulfil. She was a moral Christian person and she considered her moral behavior as

an attribute of true womanhood. But her living conditions made it almost impossible to live

according to her ethical principles, because the whole social system was immoral; so again,

she had no real chance to become the ideal woman (Washington "Modern Voices", Jacobs

85). She could never be truly domestic because as a slave she was property and therefore not

allowed to hold property herself (Jacobs 13), so she had no own household to run. She could

only acquire the proficiencies of a housewife in Mrs. Flint′s household, but she made no own

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