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Trials Of A Girlhood By Harriett Jacobs: Source Analysis

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This essay will be a discussion of the types of lives and issues women experienced in the 19th century. The two sources used for this discussion will be “Trials of a Girlhood” where the narrator, Harriett Jacobs recounts the life she experienced while enslaved and how her being a young woman affected her everyday life. The second source will be Seneca Falls, which has multiple authors highlighting struggles an everyday free, white woman has because of the patriarchal society they live in. These sources are similar in nature where they talk about women struggling although “Trials…” is much more person than Seneca Falls which is political in nature. These sources will be compared to see if the struggles of women are experienced by all or if certain women struggle more than others because of aspects of who they are.

With “Trials…”, it is from the standpoint of one woman. A slave named Harriett Jacobs, who describes the treatment …show more content…

The form it’s written out resembles the Declaration of Independence. This shows how serious of an issue this is for them as to make this document similar to one of the most important documents in history. They compare the discrimination and disadvantages they experience to what the British did to America before they declared independence. That men are hypocrites in treating women in the way they were angry about the British taking their rights away. In one of the passages, one of the women’s complaint sounds similar to what the British did. It says, “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice”. They are taking away women’s right and giving them no voice in the laws they have to follow. They just want men to treat them as equals instead of second class citizens who have no right to anything and must follow the word of men. This document is used as a way to show men what they are doing to women is unjust and that their behavior is

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As a woman, Harriet Jacobs faced unique challenges in the slave society. She was forced to endure sexual abuse from her owner and struggled to protect her children from the same abuse. This experience is clear in her narrative, which focuses mainly on the sexual misuse of female slaves. She writes with passion, using her own experiences to gain the attention of free women in the North (Jacobs).

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Analogous in form to the spiritual autobiography, the slave narrative emphasizes the difficulty of upholding moral goodness under the weight of slavery. By revealing herself as a “fallen woman” Jacobs creates a hazardous problem, capable of eliminating the sympathies of a primarily white audience. Moreover, Jacobs risks portraying herself as an impure woman, whose virtuousness departs from the piousness and gracefulness typically exemplified by the ideal woman or “angel in the house,” according to the “Cult of True Womanhood.” Therefore, in an effort to preserve the ethos of her argument, Jacobs attributes her unchaste condition to the systemic effects of American slavery. Hoping to destroy the ideology of benign paternalism, Jacobs reveals her consequential ethical dilemma through a faint description of her master’s, Dr. Flint’s, licentious behavior.

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