Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Armand

In his narrative, Frederick Douglass discussed the physical torment and dehumanizing effects afflicted upon him and other slaves during his time, and the challenges that came with it. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, on her autobiography entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, takes on the perspective of women and how they were sexually exploited and harassed during the peak of 19^th century slavery in America. In her narrative, she recounts that, even at the young age of fifteen, she was sexually abused by her master Dr. Flint. Because of this, it adds to our understanding of slavery that while slave men were forced to work under the sun and tortured if they ever disobey the command of their owners, slave women were abused inside homes and forced to accept their fate in silence. Their cries of agony, like any other slave, were forever shrouded in darkness. Sexual harassment, to me, is a hundred times worse than any account of physical torture by slave men as it degrades not just your body physically, but it also takes a toll on your self-worth and sanity, especially if you were just a mere fifteen-year-old girl. While both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs discuss and attempt to use their testimonies of slavery to push the abolitionist movement into full gear as the slaves still had to buy their way to freedom, the Slave Girl narrative hits home differently as it takes on the emotional states and challenges women had to suffer back then, such as Jacobs’s make-shift shed in the attic as a way to escape her master, and left me thinking: What if the same thing happened to my mom?

While women have been fighting for equal rights and freedom for decades, thus creating the Women’s Rights Movement in the late 20^th century, it’s hard to think that some forms of slavery still exist today and are geared towards prejudice against women and children. While physical torture has disappeared along with the slave trade, slavery in modern times consists of human trafficking and child marriage. In most third world countries, women are sexually exploited and sold for sex due to extreme poverty. Brothels, such as those in the Philippines, sell not just those of legal age, but also girls as young as twelve years old. On the other hand, while arranged marriage is a religious thing in other cultures, child marriage can be a whole different thing. To some extent, children, in countries such as Niger, are forced to marry even if they have never given their consent genuinely, thus making them subject to sexual exploitation in the long run.