"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" was one of the first books to address the struggle for freedom by female slaves; explore their struggles with sexual harassment and abuse; and their effort to protect their roles as women and mothers. These memoirs tell the atrocious but true story of slavery in the United States until the Civil War. It is the personal history of Harriet Jacobs and her enslavement and following escape to the North, after spending seven years concealed in a crawlspace. The stunned listener also gets to know of the abuse of the other slaves. We hear how slavery as practiced by the South was degrading to both blacks and whites. It shows the hypocrisy of many white Christians, who could sleep with their female slaves one day, and still see themselves as good Christians the next...
