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Harriet Jacobs Narrative Incidents In The Life Of A True Woman

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In the early days of The United States, women were taught that they had a very specific place in a patriarchal world, and from an early age were taught how to achieve this place. According to Barbara Welter in her article on “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” (1966), a woman was taught from a young age, she needed to embody piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.1 A woman needed to be religious, pure until marriage, obey her father and husband and take care of the home. With these four traits she would be a better mother, daughter, sister and wife. A woman was told that if she could embody all of these traits she would be a “true woman.” Women writers of the 19th century, wrote of discovering a balance between being a “true woman” and their individual self as well as the outcomes of “falling” from grace. …show more content…

Louisa May Alcott’s in A Long Fatal Love Chase (1861) explores the hardships faced by Rosamond Viviana as she explores her option as a fallen woman. Harriet Jacobs’ autobiographical narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) showed the hardships Linda Brent, a slave, faced and the affects her “job” had on her loss of feminine qualities and fall from grace. While women conformed to the gender roles and expectations placed on them by the patriarchal society, they found ways of defying the standards. Sedwick, Alcott and Jacobs were a few of the women writers who addressed the standards expected of women and how women broke free from the expectations finding a balance of femininity and self

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