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Name Instructor Course Date Sexual Dangers for Enslaved Women Harriet Jacobs recounts her experience as a slave in a plantation where she saw the suffering that other slaves went through. In this particular excerpt, she writes about a man who was nearly beaten to death for quarreling with his wife about the real father of her children. She goes on to give a story of a girl who dies during childbirth immediately after her newborn baby dies. The intended audiences of this document were the women of the North. The author urged them that unless they spoke out, they were as guilty as those southerners who mistreated the women. Women were forced to sleep with the masters of their husbands but were not allowed to even say a word about it. Months after the man is beaten up to near death, he is handed over together with his wife to a slave trader. Dr. Flint decides to do this business because the man’s wife ‘had let her tongue run too far’(Brent 23). This incident alone brings out the idea that women were used as sexual tools by their masters. Whatever consequences that came afterward were to be suffered by them and their families alone. There is also another incident of a girl dying during childbirth. This happened moments after her child whom he conceived after sleeping with a white man had died. It might not have been her choice to do so, but according to her mistress, she deserved all the suffering she was going through (Brent 23). The suffering of any black woman was not taken seriously by the white mistresses. It was, in fact, regarded as a punishment for their ‘actions'. The circumstances under which this document was written shows that the slaves had
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