SOURCE: Morgan, Winifred. “Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass.” American Studies 35, no. 2 (fall 1994): 73-94.

In the following essay, Morgan compares Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and states that scholars have neglected gender-related distinctions between the two texts.

Since the late 1960s, ante-bellum slave narratives have experienced a renaissance as dozens of the thousands still extant have been reprinted and as scholars have published major works on the sources, art, and development of the narratives; the people who produced them; and their on-going influence on later work. Drawing upon slave narratives as well among other sources, John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972), for example, drew attention to the complex social interactions developed in antebellum slave culture. Examining the milieu that spawned the narratives and their development, and providing insights into what the narratives...