Frederick Douglass And Harriet Jacobs Essay

Slavery is a destructive force that steals away the lives of everyone trapped under its umbrella; Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs each understood that and even while ensnared they never lost their ideas of freedom. During this essay I will describe each of their ideas of freedom and assess the differences of them and the white Americans of the nineteenth century. Fredrick Douglass described his freedom as independence of his wages and education. For Harriet Jacobs, her meaning of freedom was freedom of her own body and not only her personally but also for her children. In the nineteenth century freedom for white Americans meant something different from Douglass and Jacobs to them their views originated from the American Revolution which …show more content…
Harriet Jacob was another fugitive of their time became known afterward for her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Where she described a very different view of freedom from Douglass which she believed was freedom over her body and freedom for her children. As a woman Jacobs had not only all the threats that Douglass had but she also dealt with unrelenting sexual harassment and the constant threat of sexual abuse looming over her. She was well aware of this and knew her freedom included a right to power over her own body. Two years into her time at Dr. Flint’s he told her that she must obey every command from him in regards to anything and she was made for his use, (139) even at a young age she knew that sort of oppression couldn’t be a part of freedom and intensifies her need liberate herself from that environment where she didn’t have a say in what she could do with her body. The other aspect of her life that was essential to her freedom was not only freedom for herself but for her children. As stated when they were finally released from slavery Jacobs says she had experienced true happiness for the first time since her childhood as the darkest cloud in her life had been lifted.

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